Conway worked at IBM in the 1960s and invented generalized dynamic instruction handling, a key advancement used in out-of-order execution, used by most modern computer processors to improve performance. IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed her intention to undergo a gender transition.
After completing her transition she took a new name and identity and restarted her career. She joined Xerox PARC in 1973, where she led the "LSI Systems" group. She initiated the Mead–Conway VLSI chip design revolution in very large-scale integrated (VLSI) microchip design. That revolution spread rapidly through the research universities and computing industries during the 1980s, incubating an emerging electronic design automation industry, spawning the modern 'foundry' infrastructure for chip design and production, and triggering a rush of impactful high-tech startups in the 1980s and 1990s.
She began quietly coming out in 1999 and began working in transgender activism. In 2020, IBM apologized for firing her 52 years earlier.
Conway was born in Mount Vernon, New York, on January 2, 1938 to Christine Alice (née Burney) (1904–1977) and Rufus Llewellyn (1907–1966) Savage.[2][3][4][5] Raised as a boy, Conway was brought up in White Plains, New York, as a shy child who experienced gender dysphoria. After her parents divorced in 1945, Conway and her younger brother, Blair Savage, were raised by their mother. Conway became fascinated by astronomy (building a 6-inch (150 mm) reflector telescope one summer) and did well in math and science in school.[6]
Although she had hoped to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed her intention to transition.[15] In 2020, IBM publicly apologized to Conway for firing her; IBM held a public event "Tech Trailblazer and Transgender Pioneer Lynn Conway in conversation with Diane Gherson", then IBM's senior VP of HR. At the event, Lynn was awarded the IBM Lifetime Achievement Award for her work at IBM and later work.[16][17]
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.[14][18]
Conway joined Xerox PARC in 1973, where she led the "LSI Systems" group under Bert Sutherland.[19][20] When in PARC, Conway founded the multiproject wafers (MPW) technology. This new technology enabled multiple circuit designs from different sources to be packed into a single silicon wafer, streamlining production and reducing costs significantly.[21] 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.[22][23][24][25] 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.[23][26]
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.[14] The course validated the new design methods and textbook and established the syllabus and instructor's guidebook used in later courses worldwide.[27][28]
Among Conway's contributions was the invention of dimensionless, scalable design rules that greatly simplified chip design and design tools,[9][7][29] and invention of a new form of internet-based infrastructure for rapid prototyping and short-run fabrication of large numbers of chip designs.[9][30] They aimed to address the challenge of managing the increasing complexity of chip design, as the number of transistors per chip was doubling every two years, as Gordon Moorehad predicted in 1965. The existing design methods in the semiconductor industry were quickly becoming inadequate to keep up with this rapid advancement.[31] The new infrastructure was institutionalized as the Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service (MOSIS) system in 1981. Two years into its success, Mead and Conway received Electronics magazine's annual award of achievement.[32] Since then, MOSIS has fabricated more than 50,000 circuit designs for commercial firms, government agencies, and research and educational institutions around the world.[33] 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."[30]
The research methods used to develop the Mead–Conway VLSI design methodology and the MOSIS prototype are documented in a 1981 Xerox report[34] and the Euromicro Journal.[35] The Mead–Conway work's impact is described in several historical overviews of computing.[30][36][37][38][39][40] Conway and her colleagues compiled an online archive of original papers that documents much of that work.[41][42] The methods also came under ethnographic study in 1980 by PARC anthropologist Lucy Suchman, who published her interviews with Conway in 2021.[43][44]
In the early 1980s, Conway left Xerox to join DARPA, where she was a key architect of the United States Department of Defense's Strategic Computing Initiative.[7][45] In a 1983 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" and that she's "charismatic and very energetic".[46] Douglas Fairbairn, a former Xerox associate, said "She figures out a way so that everybody wins."[46]
As sociologist Thomas Streeter wrote in The Net Effect commenting on Conway's DARPA job:[47] "By taking this job, Conway was demonstrating that she was no antiwar liberal. (In response to critics, she has said, 'if you have to fight, and sometimes you must in order to deal with bad people, history tells us that it really helps to have the best weapons available'). But Conway carried a sense of computers as tools for horizontal communications that she had absorbed at PARC right into DARPA – at one of the hottest moments of the cold war."
Conway joined the University of Michigan in 1985 as professor of electrical engineering and computer science and associate dean of engineering. There, she worked on "visual communications and control probing for basic system and user-interface concepts as applicable to hybridized internet/broadband-cable communications".[7] She retired from active teaching and research in 1998 as professor emerita at Michigan.[48][49]
In the fall of 2012, the IEEE published a special issue of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine devoted to Lynn Conway's career,[51][52] including a career memoir by Conway[15] and peer commentaries by Chuck House,[53] former Director of Engineering at HP, Carlo Séquin,[54] and Kenneth L Shepard.[55] 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.[17]
"Clearly a new paradigm had emerged ... Importantly, imaginative support in terms of infrastructure and idea dissemination proved as valuable as the concepts, tools, and chips. The 'electronic book' and the 'foundry' were both prescient and necessary, providing momentum and proof-points."[53]James F. Gibbons, further stated that Lynn Conway, from his perspective, "was the singular force behind the entire 'foundry' development that emerged."[53]Kenneth L Shepard stated that "Lynn's amazing story of accomplishment and personal triumph in the face of personal adversity and overt discrimination should serve as an inspiration to all young engineers."[55][56]
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."[17]
Conway named the phenomenon of women and people of color being overlooked in historical accounts of innovations "the Conway Effect."[57] 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."[57]
In 2023, Lynn Conway collaborated with Jim Boulton to create Lines in the Sand,[58] a short comic book that tells the story of the invention VLSI. The launch event[59] took place at the Centre for Computing History on November 23, 2023.
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.[8] She began coming out in 1999 to friends and colleagues about her gender transition,[60][61][62] using her website to tell the story in her own words.[6] Her story was then more widely reported in 2000 in profiles in Scientific American[11] and the Los Angeles Times.[14] 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."[17]
After going public with her story, she began work in transgender activism, intending to "illuminate and normalize the issues of gender identity and the processes of gender transition".[63] She worked to protect and expand the rights of transgender people. She provided assistance to numerous other transgender women and maintained a website providing medical resources and emotional advice.[64] She maintained a website titled "Transsexual Women's Successes" to, in her words, "provide role models for individuals who are facing gender transition."[65] Her website also provided news related to transgender issues and information on gender-affirming surgery and academic inquiries into the prevalence of transsexualism[66] and transgender and transsexual issues in general.[67][68]
Conway was a critic of the Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence theory of male-to-female transsexualism that all trans women are motivated either by feminine homosexuality or autogynephilia.[77] 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.[78][79] Conway and McCloskey wrote letters to Northwestern University, accusing Bailey of "conducting intimate research observations on human subjects without telling them that they were objects of the study."[77]Alice Dreger, in her book Galileo's Middle Finger, criticized Conway for filing a lawsuit against Bailey which had "no legal basis", referring to her allegation that Bailey lacked a license as a clinical psychologist when he wrote letters in support of a young trans woman seeking to transition. According to Dreger, as Bailey did not receive compensation for his services, he would not have needed a license in Illinois and was "completely forthright in his letters supporting the women, both about the fact that he had only had brief conversations with them (as opposed to having provided them with extensive counseling) and about his own qualifications and expertise ... [and] even attached copies of his CV." As Dreger argues, "presumably all this was why [Illinois] never bothered to pursue the charge."[80] In response, Conway argued that Dreger "deflects attention away from Bailey's book and the massive trans community protest, and caricatures the entire controversy as nothing more than a vicious effort by three rather witch-like women to 'ruin the life' of a brilliant scientist."[81]
Conway was a cast member in the first all-transgender performance of The Vagina Monologues in Los Angeles in 2004,[82] and appeared in a LOGO-Channel documentary film about that event entitled Beautiful Daughters.[60][83]
In 2014, Time Magazine named Conway as one of "21 Transgender People Who Influenced American Culture".[90]
In 2015, she was selected for inclusion in "The Trans100"[91] and was interviewed in 2020 for inclusion in the Trans Activism Oral History Project.[92]
Conway married a woman in 1963, and they had two daughters together. Following their divorce in 1968, Conway was denied access to their children.[14]
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.[14][93] They soon started living together and bought a house with 24 acres (9.7 ha) of meadow, marsh, and woodland in rural Michigan in 1994.[14] They were married on August 13, 2002.[12][60][94] In 2014, the University of Michigan's The Michigan Engineer alumni magazine documented the connections between Conway's engineering explorations and her personal life.[95][96]
Conway died from a heart condition at her home in Jackson, Michigan, on June 9, 2024, at the age of 86.[97][98]
Conway, L. (September 23, 1982). "The Design of VLSI Design Methods"(PDF). Proc. VUB European Solid-State Circuits Conference (Invited Lecture). Vrije Universiteit Brüssel, Brussels, Belgium: 106–117.
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
^Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark (2000). Design Rules: The Power of Modularity. MIT Press. ISBN0-262-02466-7.
^ abcNational Research Council (1999), Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research, National Academy Press (excerptArchived February 17, 2023, at the Wayback Machine)
^"Lynn Conway". Gebbie Lab. January 29, 2024. Archived from the original on April 25, 2024. Retrieved April 24, 2024.
^Allocating Federal Funds for Science and TechnologyArchived October 17, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, by Committee on Criteria for Federal Support of Research and Development, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, National Research Council, National Academy Press, Washington DC, 1995, page 75.
^Conway, Lynn; Suchman, Lucy (February 28, 2021). "Conway-Suchman conversation". Conway Suchman Conversation. Archived from the original on April 25, 2021. Retrieved April 25, 2021.
^Lanzerotti, Mary, ed. (2012). "Editor's Note"(PDF). IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine. 4. IEEE: 1. doi:10.1109/MSSC.2012.2214274. Archived(PDF) from the original on November 29, 2015. Retrieved June 22, 2013.
^Boulton, Jim (2024). Lines in the Sand, The Lynn Conway Story (Unsung Heroes of the Information Age). Unsung Heroes (published February 21, 2024). ASINB0CW1LNGFD.
^ ab"Trans Hero: Lynn Conway". Stonewall 40: Trans Heroes. International Court System. 2009. Archived from the original on June 15, 2009. Retrieved June 14, 2009.
^Conway, Lynn (March 23, 2016), "Our Travels Through Techno-Social Space-Time: Envisioning Incoming Waves of Technological Innovation", 2016 Magill Lecture in Science, Technology and the Arts, Columbia University, archived from the original on October 29, 2022, retrieved February 17, 2023