Lynn Conway

Lynn Conway (born January 2, 1938, Mount Vernon, New York, U.S.—died June 9, 2024, Jackson, Michigan) was a trailblazing computer scientist, often called the “hidden hand” of microchip design. One of the first Americans to undergo gender-affirming surgery, Conway was also a prominent advocate for transgender rights.

Early life and career

Conway was the elder of two children born to Rufus Savage, a chemical engineer, and Christine Savage, a kindergarten teacher. Her parents divorced when she was seven. Though Conway was assigned male at birth, ever since her childhood she “felt like, and desperately wanted to be, a girl.” Reading her mother’s anthropology books provided Conway an early glimpse into the world beyond Western constructs of gender and sexuality. “It seemed like people in other cultures had found different ways to deal with what I knew I was feeling,” she told the University of Michigan in a 2014 interview. At age 14 Conway read a news story about former U.S. soldier Christine Jorgensen, whose gender-affirming surgery and transition—initially publicized in the New York Daily News without Jorgensen’s consent—had made her an international celebrity. Conway said, “I knew then what I had to do.”

Conway showed an early talent for math and science, even building a reflecting telescope with a mirror at just age 16. In the 1950s she enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to study physics. Conway first attempted to transition while at MIT; she bought and injected herself with estrogen and presented as a woman off campus. When her quest for gender-affirming surgery brought her to the dean of MIT’s medical school, Conway was told that continuing her transition could get her institutionalized. Conway began to live as a man once again and left MIT before earning a degree.

Struggles in Silicon Valley

In 1961 Conway enrolled at Columbia University, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering. She then accepted a job offer at IBM, where she developed dynamic instruction scheduling (DIS), a hardware protocol that most computers continue to use in the 21st century. The method was imperative to creating the first “superscalar” computer, which could efficiently execute multiple instructions simultaneously. DIS, though invented by Conway in 1965, was not credited to her until 2020.

As the company grew, Conway relocated to northern California, married, and had two daughters. Despite the outward appearance of a successful career and family life, Conway struggled with her mental health while living as a man.

In 1968 Conway and her wife divorced amicably while Conway pursued gender transition, including gender-affirming surgery, and she came out to her supervisors at IBM. Later that year, however, Conway was fired after a chief executive at IBM learned about Conway’s gender identity. Although Conway’s former wife had initially agreed that Conway should remain involved in their children’s lives, she changed her mind after Conway’s dismissal from IBM, fearing that social services might take their children. In 1968, jobless and estranged from her family, Conway went abroad to a reputable surgeon in Mexico for gender-affirming surgery and legally changed her name to Lynn.

Breakthroughs in chip design

Conway became an extremely private person, living and working as a woman but hiding the fact that she was transgender. Without referencing much of her experience at IBM, Conway worked her way up from the bottom of the industry before landing a position at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. There, along with collaborator Carver Mead, Conway reimagined microchip design and simplified the chip layout process.

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Until 1979, designing computer chips had been a difficult process that could only be completed by the most knowledgeable electrical engineers. Each of a chip’s transistors (which compose the integrated circuits necessary for a chip to function) had to be hand-designed and connected. Conway and Mead devised a method to simplify chip design and to make it so that any computer scientist could efficiently design a computer chip by using automated processes and what is known as structured design—a method that involves breaking down the elements of a system into more standardized, or modular, parts. Mead and Conway wrote Introduction to VLSI Systems (1978), an internal Xerox document later published as a book, to detail their work.

Teaching career

Though she received little credit for her work from the general public, Conway earned invitations to teach a seminal microchip design course, first at MIT—where her path to living authentically had once been halted—and later at the University of Michigan. She joined Michigan’s new program on VLSI design as a professor and associate dean. Conway met fellow engineer Charles Rogers on a canoe outing in Ann Arbor, and the couple married in 2002.

Over the years Conway noticed that other people were taking credit for the work she had done at IBM. She was unable to correct the record, however, without revealing that she was transgender. In 1999, on the verge of retirement, Conway came out online. She used her website to “illuminate and normalize the issues of gender identity and the processes of gender transition” and to “tell in my own words the story of my gender transition from male to female.” Her vulnerability online was a source of inspiration and hope for transgender people around the world. Conway became a prominent advocate for trans rights. In 2020 IBM formally apologized to Conway for how the corporation had treated her in the past.

See also List of Influential Women and Nonbinary People in Computing.