Lynn Conway

Early research at IBM

Conway was recruited by IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York, in 1964, and was soon selected to join the architecture team designing an advanced supercomputer, working alongside John Cocke, Brian Randell, Herbert Schorr, Ed Sussenguth, Fran Allen and other IBM researchers on the Advanced Computing Systems (ACS) project, inventing multiple-issue out-of-order dynamic instruction scheduling while working there. The Computer History Museum has stated that "The ACS architecture ... appears to have been the first 'superscalar' design".

Gender transition

After learning about Harry Benjamin's pioneering research in healthcare for transsexual women, which included the feasibility of sex reassignment surgery, Conway sought his assistance. Struggling with severe clinical depression due to gender dysphoria, she contacted Benjamin, who agreed to provide counseling and prescribed hormone replacement therapy, which Conway resumed in 1967.

While struggling with life in a male role, Conway had married a woman in 1963 and had two children. Under the legal constraints then in place, she was denied access to their children after transitioning.

Although she had hoped to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed her intention to transition. In 2020, IBM publicly apologized to Conway for firing her at a public event with Diane Gherson, then IBM's senior vice president of human relations. At the event, Conway was awarded the IBM Lifetime Achievement Award for her work at IBM and later work.

Post-transition career

Upon completing her gender transition in 1968, Conway took a new name and identity and restarted her career in stealth-mode as a contract programmer at Computer Applications, Inc. She then worked as a digital system designer and computer architect at Memorex from 1969 to 1972.

Conway joined Xerox PARC in 1973, where she led the "LSI Systems" group under Bert Sutherland. When in PARC, Conway founded the multiproject wafers (MPW) technology. Collaborating with Ivan Sutherland and Carver Mead on very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design methodology, she co-authored Introduction to VLSI Systems, a groundbreaking work that would soon become a standard textbook in chip design, used in nearly 120 universities by 1983. With over 70,000 copies sold, and the new integration of her MPC79/MOSIS innovations, the Mead and Conway revolution became part of VLSI design.

In 1978, Conway served as a visiting associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, teaching a now-famous VLSI design course based on a Mead–Conway text draft. The course validated the new design methods and textbook and established the syllabus and instructor's guidebook used in later courses worldwide.

Among Conway's contributions was the invention of dimensionless, scalable design rules that greatly simplified chip design and design tools, and invention of a new form of internet-based infrastructure for rapid prototyping and short-run fabrication of large numbers of chip designs. They aimed to address the escalating complexity of chip design, as traditional methods struggled to keep pace with Moore's law. The new infrastructure was institutionalized as the Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service (MOSIS) system in 1981. Mead and Conway received Electronics magazine's annual award of achievement in 1981. VLSI researcher Charles Seitz commented that "MOSIS represented the first period since the pioneering work of Eckert and Mauchley on the ENIAC in the late 1940s that universities and small companies had access to state-of-the-art digital technology."

The impact and research methods underlying the development of the Mead–Conway VLSI design methodology and the MOSIS prototype are detailed in a 1981 Xerox report, the Euromicro Journal, and several historical overviews of computing. Mead-Conway's methods also came under ethnographic study in 1980 by PARC anthropologist Lucy Suchman, who published her interviews with Conway in 2021.

In 1983, Conway left Xerox to join DARPA, where she was a key architect of the United States Department of Defense's Strategic Computing Initiative. In a contemporary USA Today article about Conway's joining DARPA, Mark Stefik, a Xerox scientist who worked with her, said "Lynn would like to live five lives in the course of one life". Douglas Fairbairn, a former Xerox associate, said "She figures out a way so that everybody wins." In The Net Effect, sociologist Thomas Streeter wrote that Conway’s decision to join DARPA reflected her rejection of antiwar liberalism.

Conway joined the University of Michigan in 1985 as professor of electrical engineering and computer science and associate dean of engineering. There, she specialized in visual communications and designing control systems for hybrid internet and broadband-cable user interfaces. She retired from active teaching and research in 1998 as professor emerita at Michigan.

Computer science legacy

The Mead–Conway VLSI chip design revolution quickly spread through research universities and the computing industry during the 1980s. It fostered the growth of the electronic design automation industry, established the foundry model for chip design and manufacturing, and spurred a wave of influential technology startups throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

In the fall of 2012, the IEEE published a special issue of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine devoted to Conway's career, including a career memoir by Conway and peer commentaries by Chuck House, former Director of Engineering at HP, Carlo Séquin, and Kenneth L Shepard. James F. Gibbons stated in his tribute that Conway, from his perspective, "was the singular force behind the entire 'foundry' development that emerged." Subsequently the scope of Conway's contributions gained wider retrospective attention. "Since I didn't #LookLikeanEngineer, few people caught on to what I was really doing back in the 70s and 80s," Conway later said.

In 2020, National Academy of Engineering President John L. Anderson stated that "Lynn Conway is not only a revolutionary pioneer in the design of VLSI systems ... But just as important, Lynn has been very brave in telling her own story, and her perseverance has been a reminder to society that it should not be blind to the innovations of women, people of color, or others who don't fit long outdated – but unfortunately, persistent – perceptions of what an engineer looks like."

Conway coined the term Conway effect to describe the phenomenon where people "othered" by society, such as women and people of color, are overlooked in later historical accounts of innovations. She described it in the IEEE Computer Society's Computer magazine: "This is seldom deliberate—rather, it's a result of the accumulation of advantage by those who are expected to innovate." The effect drew inspiration from the Matilda effect and Matthew effect.

In 2023, Lynn Conway collaborated with Jim Boulton to create Lines in the Sand, a short comic book that tells the story of the invention VLSI. The launch event took place at the Centre for Computing History on November 23, 2023.

Transgender rights activism

When nearing retirement, Conway learned that the story of her early work at IBM might soon be revealed through the investigations of Mark Smotherman that were being prepared for a 2001 publication. She began coming out in 1999 to friends and colleagues about her gender transition, using her website to tell her story. Her life story was then more widely reported in 2000 in profiles in Scientific American and the Los Angeles Times. In a later Forbes interview, Conway commented "From the 1970s to 1999 I was recognized as breaking the gender barrier in the computer science field as a woman, but in 2000 it became the transgender barrier I was breaking."

After sharing her story publicly, Conway began working in transgender rights activism to raise awareness, protect and expand trans rights, and promote understanding of gender identity and the process of gender transition. She provided assistance to numerous other transgender women and maintained a website providing medical resources and emotional advice. She maintained a website titled "Transsexual Women's Successes" to, in her words, "provide role models for individuals who are facing gender transition." Her website also provided news related to transgender issues and information on gender-affirming surgery and academic inquiries into the prevalence of transsexualism and transgender and transsexual issues in general.

She also advocated for equal opportunities and employment protections for transgender people in high-technology industry, and for elimination of the pathologization of transgender people by the psychiatric community.

Conway was a critic of Blanchard's transsexualism typology. Along with Andrea James and Deirdre McCloskey, she was a key person in the campaign against J. Michael Bailey's book about the theory, The Man Who Would Be Queen. Conway and McCloskey accused Bailey of conducting research on human subjects without their knowledge, sending letters to Northwestern University about this alleged misconduct.

Alice Dreger, in her book Galileo's Middle Finger, criticized Conway for filing a lawsuit against Bailey. Conway alleged Bailey lacked a clinical psychologist license when he wrote letters in support of a young trans woman seeking to transition. Dreger countered that Bailey did not need a license as he provided his services without compensation. Dreger noted that Bailey was transparent in his letters, detailing his brief interactions with the women and his qualifications, which likely explained why Illinois authorities did not act on the complaint. Conway responded, accusing Dreger of misrepresenting the controversy by portraying it as a personal attack on Bailey rather than addressing the broader protest from the trans community.

Conway was a cast member in the first all-transgender performance of The Vagina Monologues in Los Angeles in 2004, and appeared in a Logo documentary film about that event entitled Beautiful Daughters.

In 2009, Conway was named one of the "Stonewall 40 trans heroes" on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots by the International Court System and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

In 2013, with support from many tech industry leaders, Conway and Leandra Vicci of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill lobbied the directors of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for transgender inclusion in their code of ethics. The code became fully LGBT inclusive in January 2014.

In 2014, Time Magazine named Conway as one of "21 Transgender People Who Influenced American Culture".

In 2015, she was selected for inclusion in "The Trans100" and was interviewed in 2020 for inclusion in the Trans Activism Oral History Project.

Personal life and death

Conway married a woman in 1963, and they had two daughters together. Following their divorce in 1968, Conway was denied access to their children.

In 1987, Conway met her husband Charles "Charlie" Rogers, a professional engineer who shared her interest in the outdoors, including whitewater canoeing and motocross racing. They soon started living together and bought a house with 24 acres (9.7 ha) of meadow, marsh, and woodland in rural Jackson, Michigan, in 1994. They were married on August 13, 2002. In 2014, the University of Michigan's The Michigan Engineer alumni magazine documented the connections between Conway's engineering explorations and her personal life.

Conway died from a heart condition at her home on June 9, 2024, at the age of 86.

Patents

• US 5046022, Conway, Lynn; Volz, Richard & Walker, Michael, "Teleautonomous System and Method Employing Time/Position Synchrony/Desynchrony", issued September 3, 1991
• US 5444476, Conway, Lynn, "System and Method for Teleinteraction", issued August 22, 1995
• US 5652849, Conway, Lynn & Cohen, Charles, "Apparatus and Method for Remote Control Using a Visual Information Stream", issued July 20, 1997
• US 5719622, Conway, Lynn, "Visual Control Selection of Remote Mechanisms", issued February 17, 1998
• US 5745782, Conway, Lynn, "Method and System for Organizing and Presenting Audio/Visual Information", issued April 28, 1998