Lynn Conway, the pioneering computer scientist who was fired from IBM in the 1960s despite important innovations because she told management she was transgender, and who received an unprecedented formal apology from the company 52 years later, died on June 9 in Jackson, Michigan. She was 86 years old.
Her husband, Charles Rogers, said she died in hospital from complications from two recent heart attacks.
After retiring from IBM in 1968, Conway became one of the first Americans to undergo sex reassignment surgery. However, she kept it secret and lived in “stealth” mode for 31 years, fearing career retaliation and worried about her physical safety. She rebuilt her career from scratch, eventually landing at the renowned Xerox PARC Research Laboratory, where she also made important contributions to her field. After going public with her sex transition in 1999, she became a prominent transgender activist.
IBM apologized to her in 2020 in a ceremony watched online by 1,200 employees.
“Conway is probably the first employee at our company to ever come out,” Diane Gerson, then an IBM vice president, told the crowd, “so I deeply regret what you've gone through. And I know I speak for all of us when I say that.”
Conway's innovations in her field have not always been recognized, both because of her secret past at IBM and because her work was not known for designing the insides of computers, but her contributions paved the way for the personal computer and the mobile phone, and strengthened the nation's defense.
In 2009, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers awarded Conway its Computer Pioneer Award for his “fundamental contributions” to the development of supercomputers at IBM and for creating new ways of designing computer chips at Xerox PARC, which sparked a global revolution.
While working at Xerox with Carver Mead of the California Institute of Technology in the 1970s, Conway developed a way to pack millions of circuits onto a microchip, a process called very-large-scale integration (VLSI).
“My field would not exist without Lynn Conway,” Valeria Bertacco, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, reportedly said in an online tribute to Conway. “Chips were designed with paper and pencil, like an architect's blueprints in the pre-digital era. Conway's work enabled our field to develop algorithms that allowed us to use software to put 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 was a kindergarten teacher. The couple divorced when Lynn, the eldest of two children, was seven years old.
“Although I was born and raised as a boy, I felt like a girl throughout my childhood and longed to be a girl,” Conway wrote in a lengthy, personal account of her life that she began posting online in 2000.
Her talent for mathematics and science soon became apparent: at age 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 wore women's clothing off campus.
But the conflicts of her double life caused her so much stress that her grades dropped and she dropped out of MIT.
She attended Columbia University in 1961 and earned a bachelor's and master's degree in electrical engineering.
She was offered a job at IBM's research center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and assigned to the top-secret Project Y, which was designing the world's fastest supercomputer. When the engineers relocated to Menlo Park, California, Conway moved to Silicon Valley, which would soon become the global tech capital.
By that time, she was married to a nurse and had two daughters. “The marriage itself was an illusion,” Ms. Conway writes. She never lost her overwhelming conviction that she was in the wrong body, and at one point put a gun to her head in an attempt to commit suicide.
In the mid-1960s, she learned about the pioneering hormone and surgical procedures being performed by a small number of doctors. She told her husband that she wanted a sex change, which led to the breakdown of her marriage. Her mother banned her from having any contact with her children for years.
“When IBM fired me, my family, relatives, friends and many of my coworkers lost faith in me at the same time,” Conway wrote on her website. “They felt embarrassed to be around me and very ashamed of what I was doing. After that, no one wanted to have anything to do with me.”
After she transitioned, she tried to find work, but the minute she revealed her medical history, she found herself unable to get a job. She also didn't want to talk about her work history at IBM. “I had to start almost from scratch technically and prove myself all over again,” she writes.
“The idea of 'coming out' and 'becoming a man' was something I wanted to avoid at all costs, and was unthinkable,” she added. “So for the next 30 years, I barely spoke about my past to anyone except close friends and a few romantic partners.”
She eventually found work as a contract programmer, a job that led to a better position at Memorex Corporation, an audiotape company, and then, in 1973, a job at Xerox's new Palo Alto Research Center, a hub of intelligence and innovation that gave birth to the famous personal computer, the point-and-click user interface, and the Ethernet protocol.
Conway and Mead's breakthrough work in designing complex computer chips was documented in the 1979 textbook “Introduction to VLSI Systems,” which has become a standard handbook for many computer science students and engineers.
In 1983, Ms. Conway was hired by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to head the agency's supercomputer program, and after receiving her security clearance, she became convinced that prejudice against being transgender was fading.
She subsequently became professor and associate dean of the University of Michigan College of Engineering, retiring in 1988. She was elected to the Electronic Design Hall of Fame and the National Academy of Engineering.
In the late 1990s, researchers studying IBM's work from the 1960s stumbled upon Conway's contributions to computer design that had gone largely unrecognized because of his secret past identity.
At IBM, she developed ways to program computers to perform multiple operations at once, reducing processing time, a technique known as dynamic instruction scheduling that was built into many ultra-fast computers.
Fearing that an investigation into IBM's history would expose her true identity, Conway decided to tell her story herself, on her own website and in interviews with the Los Angeles Times and Scientific American.
In 2002, she married Rogers, an engineer she met on a canoe trip in Ann Arbor, Mich. She is survived by her daughters, from whom Rogers said she was estranged, and six grandchildren.
Since retiring, she has become an elder statesman in the transgender community, emailing and speaking with many people who are transitioning, sharing information about gender reassignment surgery and advocating for transgender acceptance.
She also campaigned against psychotherapists who she claims activists are trying to pathologize transgender people.
In a post on her website, Conway reflected on how she has moved from hiding her gender identity to a more imperfect acceptance of transgender people.
“Thankfully, those dark days are behind us,” she wrote, “and now tens of thousands of transgender people have not only transitioned to happy, fulfilling lives, but are openly proud of what they have accomplished in life.”
