Lynn Conway, a pioneering computer scientist who was fired by IBM in the 1960s after telling managers she was transgender, despite her significant technological innovations, and who received a rare formal apology from the company 52 years later, has died. on June 9 in Jackson. Michigan. She was 86 years old.
Her husband, Charles Rogers, said she died in a hospital from complications of two recent heart attacks.
In 1968, after leaving IBM, Ms. Conway was one of the first Americans to undergo gender reassignment surgery. She but she kept it a secret and lived in what she called “stealth” mode for 31 years out of fear of professional retaliation and concern for her physical safety. She rebuilt her career from the ground up and eventually landed at the legendary Xerox PARC laboratory, where she again made important contributions to her field. After publicly revealing her transition in 1999, she became a prominent transgender activist.
IBM apologized in 2020, in a ceremony that 1,200 employees witnessed virtually.
Ms. Conway was “probably our first employee to come out,” Diane Gherson, then a vice president at IBM, said at the meeting. “And for that, we are deeply sorry for what happened, and we know that I speak for all of us.”
Conway's innovations in his field were not always recognized, both because of his hidden past at IBM and because designing the innards of a computer is unrecognized work. But his contributions paved the way for personal computers and cell phones and bolstered national defense.
In 2009, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers awarded Ms. Conway its Computer Pioneer Award, citing her “fundamental contributions” to the development of supercomputers at IBM and her creation, at Xerox PARC, of a new way of designing computer chips. computer: “thus launching a world revolution.”
At Xerox in the 1970s, 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 wouldn't exist without Lynn Conway,” said Valeria Bertacco, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan. was quoted saying in an online tribute to Mrs. Conway. “Chips used to be designed by drawing them with paper and pencil, like an architect's plans in the pre-digital era. “Conway’s work developed algorithms that allowed our field to use software to arrange millions, and then billions, of transistors on a chip.”
Lynn Ann Conway was born on January 2, 1938 in Mount Vernon, New York, the daughter of Rufus and Christine Savage. Her father was a chemical engineer at Texaco and her mother taught kindergarten. The couple divorced when Lynn, the eldest of two children, was 7 years old.
“Though I was born and raised a child,” Mrs. Conway wrote in a long personal account of her life that began ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>publish online in 2000, “during all my childhood years I felt and desperately wanted to be a girl.”
His talents in mathematics and science quickly became evident. At age 16 he built a reflecting telescope with a six-inch lens.
When he was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of technology in the 1950s, he injected himself with estrogen and dressed like a woman off campus.
But the contradictions of his double life caused him intense stress; His grades dropped and he dropped out of MIT.
He enrolled at Columbia University in 1961 and earned bachelor's and master's degrees 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 center known as Silicon Valley.
By then she was married to a nurse and the couple had two daughters. “The marriage itself was an illusion,” Conway wrote. She had lost none of the overwhelming conviction that she inhabited the wrong body and at one point she put a gun to her head in an effort to end her life.
In the mid-1960s, he learned of the pioneering hormonal and surgical procedures being performed by a handful of doctors. She told her spouse of her desire to transition, which broke up the marriage. Her mother forbade her from contact with her children for many years.
“When IBM fired me, my entire family, relatives, friends and many colleagues also simultaneously lost trust in me,” Conway wrote on his website. “They were embarrassed to be seen with me and they were very ashamed of what I was doing. None of them would have anything to do with me after that.”
Looking for work after transitioning, she was rejected for employment once she revealed her medical history. She also didn't feel she could mention her work history at IBM. “Technically I had to start from scratch and prove myself once again,” she wrote.
“The idea of being 'outed' and somehow declared to 'be a man' was something unthinkable to be avoided at all costs,” he added, “so for the next 30 years I rarely talked about my past with anyone other than friends. close and some lovers.”
She eventually found work as a contract programmer. That job led to a better position at Memorex Corporation, the record tape company, and, in 1973, a job at Xerox's new Palo Alto Research Center, a center of brainpower and innovation that gave rise to the famous personal computer, the point-and-click user interface and the Ethernet protocol.
Ms. Conway's breakthrough in designing complex computer chips with Dr. Mead was codified in her 1979 textbook, “Introduction to VLSI Systems,” which became a standard manual for waves of students and computer science engineers.
In 1983, Ms. Conway was hired to run a supercomputer program at the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Passing her security clearance assured her that being transgender was becoming less stigmatized.
She then accepted positions as professor and associate dean at the University of Michigan engineering school, 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 60s. I came across Ms. Conway's contributions to computer design, which had gone almost completely unnoticed due to the past identity she had hidden.
At IBM, he had developed a way to program a computer to perform multiple operations at once, reducing processing time. This technology, known as dynamic instruction programming, was incorporated into many ultra-fast computers.
Fearing that research into IBM's history would uncover her, Ms. Conway decided to tell the story herself, on her website and in interviews with Los Angeles Times and American Scientist.
In 2002 she married Mr. Rogers, an engineer she had met on a canoe trip in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In addition to him, he is survived by her daughters, who Rogers said were largely estranged from her, and her six grandchildren.
When she retired, she became an elder stateswoman of the transgender community. She emailed and spoke to many transitioning people, shared information about gender surgeries, and advocated for transgender acceptance.
He also campaigned against psychotherapists who, activists said, sought to define transgenderism as a pathology.
On her website, Conway reflected on the growing, if imperfect, acceptance of transgender people since she hid her transition.
“Thankfully, those dark days have passed,” he wrote. “Today, many tens of thousands of people in transition have not only gone on to live happy and fulfilling lives, but are also open and proud of their life achievements.”
