DISCRIMINATION ON TRANSGENDER EMPLOYEES

Lynn Conway

At least one in five transgender people surveyed report experiencing employment discrimination. In six studies conducted between 1996 and 2006, up to more than half of transgender respondents indicated that they had experienced employment discrimination, including being fired, denied a promotion or harassed. Though even more difficult to measure, transgender people also face incredible barriers as job applicants. This demonstration of discrimination comes at a cost for employers, since according to a study, in the USA alone, it is estimated that more than 2 million professionals and managers leave workplaces each year due to unfairness, costing U.S. employers $64 billion annually. During the last years, several cases of discrimination against transgender employees, but one of the most indicative in terms of prejudice and cost is the one of Lynn Conway.

She made a tremendous impact in chip design the 70s with Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Her work and her textbook “Introduction to VLSI Systems” was the basis of the chip design in later years. Conway went on to win many awards and high honors, including election as a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional recognition an engineer can receive. It was only recently that it became know that Conway also did earlier pioneering research at IBM in the 1960's when she invented a powerful method for issuing multiple out-of-order instructions per machine cycle in supercomputers. By solving this fundamental computer architecture problem way back in 1965, she made possible the creation of the first true superscalar computer, and participated in its design at IBM. What happened and she left IBM? She was born and raised as a boy. She was still a boy and had a boy's name when she worked at IBM.

In 1967 she started her transition. Her case was a first at IBM. The idea that a professional person would seek a "sex change" totally shocked IBM's management. When top IBM management learned what Lynn was doing, she was fired. IBM added the term "gender identity or expression" to its worldwide anti-discrimination policy in 2002. However, one can only imagine what the cost was and the future prospects, had they been more open minded and focused on her skills and work rather than her gender identity.