Do we like Stephen Hawking?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A consistent public record on women's rights, climate and Turing's pardon, with one contested stance on Israel and a dark cloud of association he can't answer for.
Hawking is the Cambridge physicist who turned black holes and the Big Bang into bestsellers, starting with A Brief History of Time. In 2009 Barack Obama gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest US civilian honour, partly for making research accessible to everyone. He died in 2018 aged 76, so there's no new career to judge, just the record and the noise that has grown around it.
On women, he comes up well. Asked on British TV in 2017 whether he was a feminist, he said yes, adding “I have always supported women's rights.” He also said he helped open admissions to women at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and that “The results were wholly good.”
On gay rights, he put his name where it counted. In December 2012 he and ten other scientists signed a letter urging Prime Minister David Cameron to pardon the codebreaker Alan Turing, who was convicted in 1952 under the law against gay men. On trans people, nothing turned up from him either way, and that's honestly a gap rather than a clean bill.
On the planet, he was loud. In 2017 he warned that Donald Trump's decision to pull the US out of the Paris climate accord could push Earth over the brink. That's a scientist using his platform on the side of the planet, and it's the opposite of the climate-denial slide this page keeps an eye out for.
The asterisk is Israel. In 2013 he withdrew from a presidential conference in Jerusalem, and after some confusion over the reason Cambridge said his office told it the decision was about the academic boycott. A Palestinian solidarity group called it “his independent decision to respect the boycott”, while the conference chairman called it “outrageous and wrong”. Where you land depends on whether you read it as principled protest or as an unfair snub of Israeli academics.
Then there's Epstein. Hawking went to a 2006 gravity conference on Epstein's Caribbean island, months before Epstein was first charged, as the Independent reported. A 2015 Epstein email to Ghislaine Maxwell, unsealed in January 2024, referred to an alleged “underage orgy” involving Hawking and floated rewards for people who could help disprove it. Business Insider reported that the documents contain no allegations against Hawking and that he has not been publicly accused of sexual misconduct involving Epstein. His family rejects the suggestion of any wrongdoing.