Lynn Conway, a pioneering computer scientist who was fired by IBM in the 1960s after telling managers she was transgender despite her major technological innovations – and who received a rare formal apology from the company 52 years later – died on 9 June in Jackson. Mich. It was 86.
Her husband, Charles Rogers, said she died at a hospital of complications from two recent heart attacks.
In 1968, after leaving IBM, Ms. Conway was one of the first Americans to undergo gender reassignment surgery. But she kept it a secret, living in what she called “stealth” for 31 years out of fear of career reprisals and concern for her physical safety. She rebuilt her career from scratch, eventually landing at the legendary Xerox PARC lab, where she again made significant contributions to her field. After publicly disclosing her transition in 1999, she became a prominent transgender activist.
IBM apologized to her in 2020, in a ceremony attended virtually by 1,200 employees.
Ms. Conway was “probably our first employee to come out,” Diane Gherson, then an IBM vice president, told the gathering. “And for that, we deeply regret what you went through – and I know I speak for all of us.”
Ms. Conway’s innovations in her field have not always been recognized, both because of her hidden past at IBM and because designing the insects of a computer is an unacceptable job. But her contributions paved the way for personal computers and cell phones and strengthened national defense.
In 2009, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers presented Ms. Conway with its Computer Pioneer Award, citing her “foundational contributions” to the development of supercomputers at IBM and her creation, at Xerox PARC, of a new way of designing computer chips — “starting a world revolution”.
At Xerox in the 1970s, Ms. Conway, while working with Carver Mead of the California Institute of Technology, developed a way to pack millions of circuits onto a microchip, a process known as very large-scale integrated design, or VLSI.
“My field would not exist without Lynn Conway,” Valeria Bertacco, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, was quoted as saying in an online tribute to Ms. Conway. “Chips used to be designed by drawing them with paper and pencil like an architect’s blueprints in the candidate era. Conway’s work developed algorithms that allowed our field to use software to arrange millions, and later billions, of transistors on a chip.”
Lynn Ann Conway was born on January 2, 1938, in Mount Vernon, New York, to Rufus and Christine Savage. Her father was a chemical engineer for Texaco and her mother taught kindergarten. The couple divorced when Lynn, the eldest of two children, was 7 years old.
“Although I was born and raised a boy,” Ms. Conway wrote in a lengthy personal account of her life that she began posting online in 2000, “throughout my childhood I felt and desperately wanted to be a girl. .”
Her talents in math and science were quickly apparent. At 16, she built a reflecting telescope with a six-inch lens.
As a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s, she injected herself with estrogen and dressed as a woman off campus.
But the contradictions of her double life caused her intense anxiety. Her grades fell and she dropped out of MIT
He enrolled at Columbia University in 1961 and went on to earn a bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical engineering.
She was offered a position at IBM’s research center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where she was assigned to the secretive Project Y, which was designing the world’s fastest supercomputer. When the engineers moved to Menlo Park, California, Ms. Conway moved to what would soon become the global technology hub known as Silicon Valley.
By then she was married to a nurse and the couple had two daughters. “The marriage itself was an illusion,” Ms Conway wrote. She had lost none of the overwhelming conviction that she was inhabiting the wrong body, and at one point put a gun to her own head in an attempt to end her life.
In the mid-1960s, he learned about the pioneering hormonal and surgical procedures performed by a handful of doctors. She told her husband about her desire to transition, which broke up the marriage. Her mother forbade her contact with her children for many years.
“When I was fired by IBM, my entire family, relatives, friends and many colleagues also lost confidence in me at the same time,” Ms. Conway wrote on her website. “They were ashamed to be seen with me and very ashamed of what I had done. None of them would have anything to do with me after that.”
Looking for work after transitioning, she was turned down for a job once she disclosed her medical history. Nor did she feel she could cite her work history at IBM. “I had to start over almost from scratch technically and prove myself all over again,” he wrote.
“The idea of being ‘out’ and somehow claiming to be a ‘man’ was an unthinkable thing to be avoided at all costs,” he added, “so for the next 30 years I almost never talked about my past to no one but close friends and a few lovers.’
She eventually found work as a contract developer. That job led to a better position at Memorex Corporation, the recording company, and, in 1973, a job at Xerox’s new Palo Alto Research Center, a hub of brainpower and innovation that gave birth to the personal computer. point-and-click user interface and the Ethernet protocol.
Ms. Conway’s achievement in designing complex computer chips with Dr. Mead codified it in the 1979 textbook, “Introduction to VLSI Systems,” which became a standard textbook for waves of computer science students and engineers.
In 1983, Ms. Conway was hired to lead a supercomputer program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Passing her security clearance reassured her that being transgender is less and less stigmatized.
She then accepted positions as professor and associate dean in the engineering school at the University of Michigan, from which she retired in 1988. She was elected to the Electronic Design Hall of Fame and the National Academy of Engineering.
In the late 1990s, a researcher exploring IBM’s work in the 1960s found Ms. Conway’s contributions to computer design, which had been almost entirely unrecognized because of her previous identity she had hidden.
At IBM, he had developed a way to program a computer to perform multiple operations simultaneously, reducing processing time. Known as dynamic instruction programming, the technology was incorporated into many superfast computers.
Afraid that researching IBM’s history would let her down, Ms. Conway decided to tell the story herself, on her website and in interviews with the Los Angeles Times and Scientific American.
In 2002 she married Mr. Rogers, an engineer she had met on a canoe trip in Ann Arbor, Mich. Besides him, she is survived by her daughters, who Mr Rogers said were largely estranged from her, and six grandchildren.
When she retired, she became an elder statesman of the transgender community. She emailed and talked to many who were transitioning, shared information about gender reassignment surgery, and advocated for transgender acceptance.
He also campaigned against psychotherapists who campaigners said tried to define transsexuality as a pathology.
On her website, Ms Conway reflected on the growing, if imperfect, acceptance of transgender people after hiding her transition.
“Thankfully, those dark days are over,” he wrote. “Today, many tens of thousands of transitioners have not only gone on to happy and fulfilling lives, but are also open and proud of their achievements in life.”
