ThinkHer

 T he Moment the Music Stopped Recently, I witnessed a moment of pure, seamless team joy—a bus journey filled with amazing energy, musical talent, and unfiltered laughter among friends. It was the kind of spontaneous, high-trust environment every team member or leader strives for. Then came the catch: the singalong shifted to songs heavy with sexual innuendo, laced with lewdness and objectification. This moment brings to the forefront a painful question many face in professional life: Should we speak up about content everyone else seems to be enjoying? Will we be branded the "killjoy," isolated, or risk losing the goodwill of the group? This dilemma is amplified when family members are present, yet the reported response was a dismissive suggestion that the content would be enjoyed regardless. Created in Canva The Unfair Burden of the 'Single Voice' Speaking up for rights inherently runs risks. Gender equality is often unfairly delegated as the sole responsibility o...

Haimabati Sen, born Haimabati Ghosh, was among the earliest female physicians in colonial India. A woman who transformed her unimaginable early trauma into a lifelong mission of healing and social change. Her life embodies resilience, quiet courage, and a refusal to accept the limitations imposed on women of her time. Haimabati was born in 1866 in the Khulna district of the then Bengal Presidency, into a Kulin Kayastha zamindar family. Her father, a zamindar, was unusually liberal for his time — he allowed her to wear male attire and to study alongside her male cousins, a rare privilege for a girl in that era. Y et, societal norms prevailed. At the mere age of nine, she was married off to a 45-year-old widower and Deputy Magistrate with two daughters nearly her own age.  Her husband’s behaviour exposed her, at a very young age, to unsettling and sexually abusive circumstances. He forced himself on her, leaving her frightened and still — “like a piece of wood,” she later wrote....

Who can truly be called a feminist when we look back at history? The question is not a simple one, because applying a modern term to pre-modern figures risks flattening the complexity of their world. And yet, to leave the question unasked is to overlook the ways in which women have carved out power, voice, and agency within systems that often sought to silence them. Few figures raise this question more vividly than Saint Hildegard von Bingen (also known as the  Sibyl of the Rhine) , the twelfth-century abbess whose astonishing life and work continue to resonate across the centuries. Hildegard von Bingen from  Hulton Archive Born into German nobility in 1098, Hildegard entered a cloister at fifteen, and from within its walls she built an extraordinary legacy. She became a theologian and visionary whose writings on purgatory shaped Church doctrine, a composer of strikingly original music, and a playwright. She preached publicly—rare for a woman of her time—denouncing corruption ...

The first semester during my undergraduate years, there was a  “History of Physics” course. The syllabus was basically a list of scientists stretched from Aristotle to Einstein, a sweeping arc of minds that had shaped the discipline. The biographies we read were neatly arranged on a timeline of progress, their personal lives mostly stripped of social context. It was a history of achievements, not of people. These were tales of individual brilliance, where obstacles existed mainly to be overcome. And in this, I first recognized the pattern of what scholars now call the “superscientist” narrative: an individual—usually male—who triumphs over adversity to push the boundaries of knowledge. When women did appear, their stories followed the same arc but with a twist. Their struggle wasn’t against poverty or bad luck, but against patriarchy itself. Think of how we tell the stories of Marie Curie, Janaki Ammal, or Rosalind Franklin—as models of resilience, who not only conducted pathbreaki...

I had heard of Bertha Lutz before—as a women’s rights activist, a leader in Brazil’s suffragist movement, and one of the four women who signed the UN Charter in 1945, the document that officially established the United Nations. That’s how she’s usually remembered: a fierce feminist, a diplomat, someone who stood her ground at the world’s most important political tables. But what surprised me was where else her name shows up—not in laws, monuments or even street names, but in frogs and lizards!! It turns out Bertha Lutz was not only a political force, but also a trained biologist and naturalist. Before her name became tied to international diplomacy, she was studying amphibians at the Sorbonne and working as a researcher at Brazil’s National Museum. Her background in biology wasn’t a footnote—it shaped the way she thought, worked, and fought. She approached activism with the same discipline and curiosity she applied to science. I’m often struck, in conversations with fellow researchers,...