Pride Month: Recognizing LGBTQ Pioneers in Tech
Meet 15 individuals whose work has impacted both the tech world and the LGBTQ community.
![Pride Month Be Yourself Pride Month Be Yourself](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt0a6aa83eeb386030/65245068d3a7fe9338545cd9/Pride-Month_Be-Yourself.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Shutterstock
English computer scientist, mathematician and cryptanalyst Alan Turing is generally considered to be the father of theoretical computing science and artificial intelligence. His Turing Machine was one of the earliest models of a general-purpose computer, and the foundation for all computers to come. Working on artificial intelligence, he developed the Turning Test to evaluate whether a machine could exhibit intelligent behavior equal to or better than that of a human.
But Turing is probably best known his work as a cryptanalyst.
During World War II, he cracked the Nazis’ Enigma Code, making it possible for the Allies to decipher intercepted messages.
In 1952, British authorities discovered that Turing was gay. He was arrested and prosecuted for “gross indecency.” He committed suicide by taking cyanide.
In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II signed a posthumous pardon for his conviction. And Britain’s Policing and Crime Act 2017 contained a provision known as the Alan Turing Law. It retroactively pardons men who were cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexuality.
To paraphrase Barak Obama, Edie Windsor was a little lady who made a big difference.
Windsor is arguably best known for being the lead plaintiff in the 2013 Supreme Court of the United States case United States vs. Windsor. The case resulted in the Supreme Court overturning Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act. Defense of Marriage Act. It was considered a landmark legal victory for the same-sex marriage movement in the United States. Because of the decision, the Obama Administration and federal agencies extended rights, privileges and benefits to married same-sex couples.
But in addition to breaking down walls for LGBTQ rights, Windsor was involved in breaking new ground in the tech industry. She spent 16 years at IBM, starting out as a mainframe programmer and rising through the ranks to become a senior systems programmer, the company’s highest technical rank.
Leaving IBM in 1975, Windsor founded and served as president of PC Classics, a consulting firm that specialized in software development projects. She helped many LGBTQ groups computerize their mail systems and become — as she expressed it — “tech literate.”
In 1987, Windsor was recognized by the National Computing Conference as an operating systems pioneer. In 2013, she was the Grand Marshal of the New York City LGBT Pride March. That same year, she was runner-up to Pope Francis for Time magazine’s Person of the Year.
In 2016, Lesbians Who Tech launched the Edie Windsor Coding Scholarship Fund. The fund advances the education of LGBTQ women in the tech industry by providing coding-school tuition, mentorship and other support.
In June 2019, Windsor was one of the inaugural 50 American “pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes” inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor, part of the Stonewall National Monument in New York City‘s Stonewall Inn.
British computer scientist Peter Landin determined that computer programs could be based on mathematical logic. This paved the way for the development of programming languages that could be universally understood by different machines.
Openly bisexual, Landin became involved with the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in the 1970s. Over the years, he became increasingly devoted to gay rights activism.
Lynn Conway is considered to be one of the most important pioneering engineers of supercomputer technologies and microchip design. She started working at IBM in 1964 as part of a team building an advanced supercomputer. In 1968, she notified the company of her intention to transition from male to female. While the divisional management was supportive, the corporate office fired her.
After completing her transition in 1968, Conway sent out with a new name and a new identity and started rebuilding her career. She started out as a contract programmer and quickly moved up in the tech field. In the 1970s, while working at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, she developed methods for simplifying the design of silicon chips. In addition to spurring the development of Silicon Valley, the methodology is what makes cell phones and laptops possible.
Conway left Xerox in the 1980s. She went first to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency where she served as assistant director for strategic computing. In 1985, she became the associate deal of engineering and a professor of electrical engineering.
Throughout her second career, Conway never revealed her gender transition. But as she approached retirement in 1999, she shared the information with her friends and colleagues. After that, she told her story on her personal website and was soon profiled in Scientific American and The Los Angeles Times.
After making her story public, Conway became a transgender activist. In 2014, she was named one of the 21 Transgender People Who Influenced American Culture by Time magazine.
In 2020, IBM formally apologized to Conway for her firing during a virtual event in which she was recognized and awarded for “her lifetime body of technical achievements, both during her time at IBM and throughout her career.”
Jon Hall is chairman of Linux Professional Institute. He was given the nickname “Maddog” by students at Hartford State Technical College when he was head of the computer science department there. It’s his preferred monicker.
Hall, who has worked for a number of tech companies over the course of his career, is an advocate for free and open-source software. The Linux Professional Institute provides certification to open-source professionals.
In 2012, Hall wrote an essay for Linux Magazine honoring Alan Turing, another LGBTQ pioneer in tech, on his 100th birthday. In that essay, Hall announced that he is gay.
“This announcement will surprise some people, and not surprise others,” he wrote. “I have ‘come out’ to some people (usually my closest friends) and not others. I do not ‘flaunt’ my homosexuality, neither do I lie about it. If people ask me directly about my homosexuality, I tell them.”
“Computer science was a haven for homosexuals, transsexuals and lot of other ‘sexuals,’ mostly because the history of the science called for fairly intelligent, modern-thinking people.”
Mary Ann Horton contributed to the development of the Berkeley UNIX operating system, an important step in the development of the internet. She also made significant contributions to the rights of transgenders in the workplace.
In 1997, Horton was working for Lucent Technologies. A transgender woman herself, she asked that the phrase “gender identity, characteristics, or expression” be included in the company’s Equal Opportunity (EO) nondiscrimination policy. Lucent complied and thus became the first company in the U.S. to add transgender-inclusive verbiage to its EO policy.
Today Horton is the owner of Red Ace Technology Solutions.
Based in the U.K., American Claudia Brind-Woody is IBM’s managing director for the Walgreens Boots Alliance Integrated Account. She leads teams in both Europe and North America. Brind-Woody has been with IBM for nearly 25 years. She previously worked as director of results for the Atlanta committee for the Olympics, vice president of business development for CenturyLink and as the assistant dean of the College and Graduate School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.
As co-chair of the IBM Global Executive Taskforce for LGBT Constituencies, she has championed LGBTQ+ diversity in the workplace.
“When our employees don’t have to think twice about struggling for the same benefits, recognition or afraid of being safe, then productivity goes up,” she said in an interview with Business Insider.
Among the myriad honors Brind-Woody has received are the 2011 Out & Equal Trailblazer Award, The Guardian’s 2012 World Pride Power List Top 100, the 2016 Financial Times LGBT Role Models Hall of Fame and the 2017 Workplace Pride Ambassador Award.
Apple’s Tim Cook came out as gay in 2014 in an open letter published in Businessweek. That made him the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Five years later he told People en Español, “I have not regretted it for one minute. Not at all.” Cook told the magazine that his primary motivation in coming out was the letters he was getting from young people “who were struggling with their sexual orientation.”
“They were depressed,” he said. “Some said they had suicidal thoughts. Some had been banished by their own parents and family. It weighed on me what I could do.”
“There’s been a lot of people that came before me that made it possible for me to sit here today and I needed to do something to help those people that were in a younger generation.”
Cook joined Apple in 1968 at the invitation of Steve Jobs. Starting out as senior vice president for worldwide operations, he moved to executive vice president for worldwide sales and operations. Cook took on the responsibilities of chief executive when Jobs went on medical leave to fight pancreatic cancer. He was named CEO in 2011, the same year Jobs died.
In his 2014 Businessweek letter, Cook stated, “I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others.”
He goes on to say, “For years I’ve been open with many people about my sexual orientation. Plenty of colleagues at Apple known I’m gay, and it doesn’t seem to make a difference in the way they treat me.”
“Of course, I’ve had the good fortune to work at a company that loves creativity and innovation and knows it can only flourish when you embrace people’s differences.”
Megan Smith is co-founder and CEO of shift7, a collective that brings together figures in tech and public service for collaborative innovation. In 2014, President Obama appointed her to serve as the third chief technology officer of the United States. She was the first woman to hold the position.
Previously, Smith spent more than 11 years at Google as vice president of new business development and then as vice president of Google[x]. She helped launch the company’s Solve for X and Women Techmakers.
Ann Mei Chang is the former chief innovation officer at USAID. The independent federal agency provides foreign aid. During her tenure, she became the first executive director of the US Global Development Lab, which teams with Silicon Valley to innovate global solutions.
After leaving USAID, Chang worked as chief innovation officer for the presidential campaign of Pete Buttigieg. She was in charge of data, analytics and technology.
Chang has worked in product development and engineering for Apple, Google and Intuit. She also spent two years as the U.S. Department of State’s senior advisor for women and technology.
A partner in consulting and coaching practice Oxegen Consulting, Sara Sperling works with companies in and around high-tech. Known for being quick-witted and a crusader for inclusivity, Sperling previously headed up human resources for Snapchat and Doordash. She also developed the diversity and inclusion program for Facebook when she worked there.
Ana Arriola is a director of product design at Microsoft. She focuses on the human-centric and ethical design of products including Bing. She previously worked in product design for Facebook, Samsung and Sony.
Speaking at the 2016 Tech Inclusion Conference, she told the audience, “Don’t be told how or what you should be doing in your life. You define it yourself.”
Tech blogger and web developed Gina Trapani is a managing partner at Postlight. The company builds platforms that power websites, apps and other digital products. and products.
Before joining Postlight, Trapani led the development of ThinkUp, an open-source social media and aggregation and analysis tool. Prior to that, she launched the Lifehacker blog and led it from January 2005 to January 2009.
Leanne Pittsford is the founder and CEO of three tech-centric has founded three tech-centric initiatives: Lesbians Who Tech, Tech Jobs Tour and include.io.
Founded in 2012, Lesbians in Tech offers programming, visibility and opportunities to LGBTQ+ women and non-binary individuals who work in tech. The largest LGBTQ community of technologists in the world, it is committed to visibility, intersectionality and changing the face of tech. The organization has more than 40,000 members in over 40 city chapters worldwide.
The Tech Jobs Tour started in 2016. It connects diverse tech talent with companies that diversity is an advantage, and that inclusive teams are stronger, smarter and better.
include.io, started in 2018, is a staffing and recruiting company that helps underrepresented members of the tech community find their dream jobs. include describes itself as “a place where people can be valued for who they are and companies can let everyone know how great their culture is.”
Taiwan-born Audrey Tang is a self-taught programmer. By the age of 19, she was working in Silicon Valley. An advocate for free software and an open web, she led the Pug project for developing the Perl 6 language and started the Perl Archive Toolkit (PAT).
In 2016, Tang was invited to join the Taiwan Executive Yuan, the executive branch of the government of the Republic of China (Taiwan). At 35, she was Taiwan’s youngest-ever government minister. She was also the first transgender and non-binary official in the cabinet.
In 2020, Tang gained worldwide notice for proactive work in dealing with the coronavirus. She created an app that shows face mask inventories, providing health officials with accurate, comprehensive data.
Taiwan-born Audrey Tang is a self-taught programmer. By the age of 19, she was working in Silicon Valley. An advocate for free software and an open web, she led the Pug project for developing the Perl 6 language and started the Perl Archive Toolkit (PAT).
In 2016, Tang was invited to join the Taiwan Executive Yuan, the executive branch of the government of the Republic of China (Taiwan). At 35, she was Taiwan’s youngest-ever government minister. She was also the first transgender and non-binary official in the cabinet.
In 2020, Tang gained worldwide notice for proactive work in dealing with the coronavirus. She created an app that shows face mask inventories, providing health officials with accurate, comprehensive data.
As many LGBTQ pioneers in tech were changing the tech world, they were also fighting for inclusion. Surrounded by societal stigmas and bias, they focused on technological innovations for the good of humanity. At the same time, they worked to overcome the prejudice and persecution that confronted the LGBTQ community. Some did it openly and vocally, and some worked behind the scenes to elevate and empower their community. Still others exhibited strength, quiet resolution and determination, making them powerful role models.
Apple’s Tim Cook
Tim Cook, for example, came out as gay in 2014, three years after he was named Apple’s CEO. In an essay for Businessweek he wrote, “While I have never denied my sexuality, I haven’t publicly acknowledged it, either, until now. So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.”
Ever the pragmatist, Cook also wrote that being gay had been “tough and uncomfortable at times, but it has given me the confidence to be myself, to follow my own path, and to rise above adversity and bigotry. It’s also given me the skin of a rhinoceros, which comes in handy when you’re the CEO of Apple.”
Adversity in the Pursuit of Diversity
Lynn Conway
Supercomputer pioneer Lynn Conway faced incredible adversity. She had worked at IBM for four years when she informed the company of her intention to transition from male to female — and was fired by the company. After completing her transition in 1968, she set out with a new name and identity to rebuild her career.
While it wasn’t until the late 1990s that Conway felt comfortable telling her new friends and colleagues about her gender transition, she certainly had no regrets.
“When I made the decision to have a gender correction, everybody told me I was terrible, I was going to end up in an asylum someplace,” she told ABC News. “But they were wrong. I’ve had a great life, I’m very happy and I’ve managed to do some productive, important work.”
Ann Mei Chang
On the lighter side, author and industry veteran Ann Mei Chang said that being a lesbian in the tech sector had some benefits. Chang, who’s worked at leading companies such as Apple, Google and Intuit, told Fortune that she often was “one of the guys.”
“You diffuse the sexual tension thing,” Chang said. “You are working with young and nerdy guys who aren’t sure how to deal with women. It made it a lot easier.”
Click through the slideshow above to learn more how about the accomplishments of 15 of the LGBTQ pioneers in tech.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Buffy Naylor or connect with her on LinkedIn. |
About the Author(s)
You May Also Like