Are Most Geniuses Men?

A journey through history, myth, and the hidden architecture of brilliance

Picture a dusty lecture hall in 1915 Göttingen. At the blackboard stands Emmy Noether, a Jewish woman in her thirties, writing equations that would later reshape modern physics. Her theorems would be hailed as the mathematical heart of Einstein’s relativity. And yet, for years she was not even allowed to lecture under her own name; her courses were officially listed under a male colleague.

Stories like Noether’s haunt the record of human genius. They force us to ask: is the scarcity of famous women geniuses evidence that they did not exist, or proof that history simply refused to see them?

The Myth of the Male Genius

Our cultural imagination is crowded with male titans — Newton, Mozart, Einstein, Picasso. We know their eccentricities, their eureka moments, even their hairstyles. Genius, in the Western tradition, has long worn a man’s face.

But this image is not natural law. It is a myth, manufactured over centuries, reinforced by who had access to education, whose names made it into the archives, and which stories society chose to glorify. To believe that genius is inherently male is to mistake a trick of cultural storytelling for a biological truth.

Barriers, Not Brains

For most of recorded history, women were locked out of the institutions that mint genius.

• Education: Universities were closed to women until the late 19th century in most of Europe. In Cambridge, women could attend lectures from the 1860s but were denied full degrees until 1948.
• Academies and societies: The Royal Society of London, founded in 1660, did not elect a woman fellow until 1945.
• Patents and publishing: In 19th-century America, a married woman could not legally hold a patent in her own name.

Against this backdrop, the question isn’t why there were so few women geniuses, but how any managed to emerge at all.

Erased, Misattributed, Forgotten

Consider a few cases that illustrate the mechanics of invisibility:

• Rosalind Franklin: Her X-ray crystallography photographs were pivotal to the discovery of DNA’s double helix. Yet the Nobel Prize went to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins in 1962. Franklin had died, uncredited.
• Mary Anning: A self-taught fossil collector in 19th-century Dorset, she discovered the first ichthyosaur skeleton at age 12. Male scientists published the findings; she was barely mentioned.
• Hedy Lamarr: Glamorous Hollywood starlet — but also inventor of frequency-hopping technology, the foundation of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Her work was dismissed for decades as a curiosity.

These women were not anomalies. They were part of a much larger pattern: brilliance thriving in obscurity because society refused to take it seriously.

What Does Science Say About Gender and Genius?

Here lies a common objection: “But maybe men are just more likely to be geniuses?” The research does not support this.

• IQ studies: Men and women score virtually the same on average intelligence tests.
• Variability hypothesis: Some argue men are overrepresented at both extremes of ability. While a small effect sometimes appears in certain tests, results vary widely across countries and diminish in more gender-equal societies — a sign that culture, not biology, is the heavier hand.
• Neuroscience: Brain scans reveal minor structural differences between sexes, but they explain nothing about creativity or discovery. The human brain is remarkably plastic, shaped more by environment and training than by anatomy.
• Stereotype threat: When women are reminded of the stereotype that men excel in math or science, their test performance measurably drops. Remove the stigma, and the gap shrinks.

The evidence is overwhelming: genius is not wired into the Y chromosome. What differs is opportunity, expectation, and recognition.

The Machinery of Recognition

Why, then, does the myth endure? Because genius is not just about ideas. It is also about being seen.

The “lone male genius” archetype has dominated since the Romantic era — think Beethoven storming at the piano. Genius was cast as masculine, defiant, obsessive.

Institutions amplify this image. Prizes, professorships, canons — they enshrine certain figures, leaving others in the margins.

Media loves a hero. Journalists write profiles of Einstein’s messy hair or Steve Jobs’s black turtleneck, while collaborative and quiet forms of brilliance fade from view.

In other words, genius is not only created in the mind, but curated by society.

Intersectional Silences

The erasure is not uniform. It is deepest at the intersections of gender with race, class, and colonial power.

• Phillis Wheatley: An enslaved Black woman in 18th-century America, wrote poetry so brilliant that a panel of white men convened to confirm she had actually authored it.
• Katherine Johnson: A Black mathematician at NASA, calculated trajectories for the Apollo missions; for decades her contributions were overshadowed until belated recognition in the 21st century.

These examples remind us: the history of genius is not just gendered, but racialised and stratified by class.

Today: Progress, But Not Parity

The landscape has shifted dramatically. Women now outnumber men in many university classrooms. Fields once closed — from astrophysics to architecture — are open. Women win Nobel Prizes, lead laboratories, direct symphony orchestras.

And yet:

• Women remain underrepresented at the very top tiers of science and art.
• They are less likely to receive prestigious awards, even when productivity is equal.
• The “leaky pipeline” persists: talented women leave careers at higher rates due to childcare burdens, discrimination, and lack of support.

The talent is there. The bottleneck is recognition and retention.

Reframing Genius

What if the true problem is not that women have been denied genius, but that our very definition of genius has been too narrow?

We have fetishised the lone, tortured male innovator. But many of the world’s most transformative ideas — the internet, climate science, vaccines — emerge from networks of collaboration. If we widen the lens, we see brilliance everywhere, in many forms.

Reframing genius means rewriting the stories we tell: not just Newton’s apple, but the countless minds who made the orchard possible.

A Final Verdict

So, are most geniuses men? The truthful, unvarnished answer is: they only appear so, because history has been written with one eye shut.

The raw capacity for genius has never been male. It has always been human. But for centuries, men held the keys — to classrooms, laboratories, publishing houses, academies. Women were there too, thinking, creating, inventing — only to be silenced, sidelined, or stolen from.

The tragedy is not that women produced fewer geniuses. The tragedy is that we failed to recognise them.

And the greatest opportunity of our age? To make sure the next Einstein or Mozart need not fight history just to be seen.