Who Gets to Be Creative?

The Power and Politics of Genius

The Genius Myth We All Inherited

Genius is such a charged word. When I hear it, names like Picasso, Warhol, Einstein, and Musk immediately come to mind as the archetypal “Lone Men” of innovation. We’ve been taught to see them as rare forces of nature, blessed with an almost mystical power to shape culture and bend the world to their ideas. We study them obsessively, searching for the secret formula—was it talent? upbringing? luck?—hoping to sip from the same cup and join their ranks.

But Helen Lewis, in The Genius Myth, invites us to look beyond the myth. She argues that these stories of “brilliance” erase the ecosystems that make genius possible, like the collaborators, partners, and cultural scaffolding that supported each so-called visionary. As a self-proclaimed systems and processes girlie, I was hooked. While others analyze the educational pedigree or achievements of these mythic men, Lewis zooms out to the structures that enabled them: the societies that gave them platforms, the wives and assistants who carried their burdens, the institutions that validated their voices.

Her question lingers long after the final chapter:

Why do we remember their names—but not the networks, collaborators, or teachers who helped shape their ideas?

The Gatekeepers of Creativity

In my last essay on Redefining Creativity, I highlighted psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research showing that creativity isn’t just an individual spark—it’s a system.

Let’s read that again: creativity isn’t just an individual spark—it’s a system.

And within that system, the Field, or the gatekeepers, play an enormous role. They decide which ideas to nurture, validate, and help blossom. They’re the experts who determine which innovations are “worthy,” shaping the stories we tell about what counts as creative and who gets to be called a genius. They hold our collective trust to define taste, talent, and even truth. Think of them as the Miranda Priestlys of the world, dictating the cultural relevance of cerulean blue.

But when we look closer, we see how uneven that system has been, how power and privilege decide whose creativity makes it past the gate. For most of modern history, those gates were guarded, sometimes quietly and sometimes blatantly, by systems that privileged certain people while excluding others. And nowhere is that clearer than in the story of women in STEM.

For centuries, women weren’t even allowed in the rooms where discovery happened. They were barred from universities, scientific societies, and laboratories. When they did contribute, their work was often buried under a man’s name or erased entirely. Caroline Herschel discovered several comets in the late 1700s but spent much of her career cataloging data for her brother William, who was celebrated as the true astronomer. Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray diffraction images revealed the double helix structure of DNA, yet it was Watson and Crick who claimed the Nobel Prize and the glory. Even in the twentieth century, women like Jocelyn Bell Burnell (who discovered pulsars) and Lise Meitner (who helped uncover nuclear fission) saw their work credited to male colleagues.

Beyond individual erasures, there were structural barriers: women couldn’t attend many universities until the mid-1900s, couldn’t vote, and were often expected to abandon their careers once they married. These weren’t isolated cases—they were policies, traditions, and unspoken rules that shaped who was allowed to be seen as “brilliant.”

The result? Generations of creativity lost to systemic exclusion—not because women lacked genius, but because the Field, as Csikszentmihalyi would say, refused to recognize their light.

When we talk about “rare genius,” we’re often really talking about rare permission.

The Cost of the Genius Narrative

The systems that keep certain voices quiet come at a steep cost—for individuals and for society. Research shows that the cracks in creative belonging appear far earlier than most people realize. By age six, girls are already less likely than boys to associate “being really smart” with their own gender, a quiet but powerful message that they don’t belong in the “brilliance club.”

Between the ages of eleven and fifteen, that gap widens. One large-scale Microsoft study found that girls’ interest in STEM peaks at eleven and then plummets through the teen years. U.S. studies mirror this trend, showing that confidence and exposure to STEM opportunities drop sharply during middle school. Meanwhile, Black and Hispanic students face even greater barriers—Google and Gallup found that they have less access to computer science classes, mentors, and confidence-building opportunities. The result is an unspoken message: maybe this space wasn’t built for me.

When students internalize that message, creativity doesn’t disappear. It simply goes underground. The spark is still there, but the soil around it turns hard and unwelcoming.

There is no creativity gap. There is only an opportunity gap, and it’s costing us all.

The most innovative teams and societies thrive on diversity of thought and lived experience. When we silence vast swaths of potential because of bias or tradition, it’s not just those individuals who lose. We all do. Every gate unchallenged, every barrier left in place, is another idea never born, another solution never seen, another future never built.

Collective Creativity — The Hidden Reality

One of the most powerful ideas in Helen Lewis’s The Genius Myth is her insistence that no act of brilliance happens in isolation. Every “genius” stands on a foundation of invisible labor. The partners, collaborators, and cultural ecosystems that make their work possible. History tends to remember the spotlight, not the stagehands.

Take Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić. Though often described as his “first wife,” Marić was a physicist and mathematician in her own right, believed by many historians to have contributed to his early work on relativity. Yet her name faded into the margins as Einstein’s fame grew. The same story echoes through time. Véra Nabokov editing and managing her husband Vladimir’s literary empire; Sophia Tolstoy painstakingly copying War and Peace by hand while raising thirteen children; Alice B. Toklas anchoring Gertrude Stein’s entire creative world. Their labor made the genius possible, but history rarely wrote them in.

Musician and producer Brian Eno offers a better frame: scenius, “the intelligence of a whole operation or group of people.” He reminds us that creativity thrives in ecosystems, not ivory towers. “Let’s forget the idea of genius for a while,” he writes. “Let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new work.”

If creativity is a garden, scenius is the soil — the nutrient-rich mix of ideas, feedback, and shared energy that allows innovation to grow. The myth of the rare genius, by contrast, is the fence that keeps most people out.

When we look closely at the moments that changed culture, like the Harlem Renaissance, Motown, Silicon Valley’s early days, we see not Lone Heroes, but networks. Sparks colliding, cross-pollinating, igniting each other. That’s where real creativity lives: in the friction and the fellowship.

If we want a world that continues to innovate, we need to stop worshiping the individual flame and start tending to the ecosystem that helps all of us burn brighter.

And if creativity is a living ecosystem, then failure is part of its natural cycle. Every idea, like every plant, needs pruning—moments of loss, learning, and recalibration that make the next bloom possible. The myth of genius tells us that mistakes are fatal; the truth is that failure is the soil where innovation grows. In the next essay, we’ll dig into that soil—how failure shapes creativity, what it teaches us about resilience, and why our willingness to stumble may be humanity’s greatest creative strength.