DEI

Or is it DIE? “Die” feels more fitting with the way the Trump administration is attacking our community. When I used to do diversity training I used to use the case of Lynn Conway. I first found out about her back around 2005, when things were slow at work, I started looking up the old computers I’d worked on, IBM 1620, IBM 360, PDP-8, and so on. I came across an article about the IBM 360 and something called dynamic instruction scheduling. Huh. It described how one engineer helped develop the idea, but then work got in the way of my curiosity.

A couple of months later, I remembered the article and went back to it. This time I noticed it was about a woman. That caught my attention.

Being trans, my radar went off—beep, beep.

I found her university webpage; she was a Professor Emeritus. I learned that when she transitioned, she was asked to leave IBM... she didn’t fit the “flat-top haircut, thin blue tie, blue sports jacket with a white shirt and a pocket protector” mold.

IBM’s loss was significant. She went on to become a leader in integrated circuit design, worked with DARPA, and later received the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Pioneer Award for her foundational contributions to computer architecture and VLSI design.

When I taught diversity, I used her story as an example: IBM let go of a highly talented engineer because she was trans—it was our gain and IBM loss.