Reckoning with the Conway Effect: Mimi Fox Melton on Challenging Power in the Tech Industry
I was recently interviewed to be on PBS Utah’s "In the Margins" series on their Origins Youtube Channel. The mini documentary, What’s the Conway Effect and What Does it Say About Tech? offers a snapshot into the ways the tech industry has relied on the innovations, expertise, and labor of marginalized people, while simultaneously erasing their contributions and barring them from the status of innovator. Lynn Conway’s story speaks to the ways that the cultural norms and practices of the tech industry are driven by white supremacy.
Conway was a white trans woman who did pathbreaking work on the first supercomputer in the mid 1960s for IBM where she invented DIS (dynamic instruction scheduling). Soon after, she was fired when her employers identified her as transgender. She started her career over, taking a job at a Xerox research center where she and Carver Mead co-created VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration), an innovation that revolutionized microelectronics. Still, she continued to see her contributions side-lined while white men, including Mead, received accolades and recognition.
The Conway Effect is a term that Lynn Conway used to describe the ways the work and expertise of marginalized people in the tech industry is undervalued, erased, and overlooked. In her 2018 essay, “The Disappeared: Beyond Winning and Losing,” she writes specifically about the ways that the status of innovator has been attached to white men, making it reflexive within the tech industry to overlook, undermine, or disregard innovative contributions by those outside the norms of whiteness and maleness. Conway called this, “the Conway Effect." In essence, white supremacy and systemic oppression guard the status of innovator.
By naming “the Conway Effect,” Lynn Conway joined numerous scholars of race and gender who have written extensively about systemic oppression. It is important to locate Conway’s story within the workings of power, rooted in white supremacy, at play in the tech industry. White supremacy requires adherence to binary gender norms, and punishes people who step out of line.
Black Feminist scholars, including renowned legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, have well illustrated the ways in which the gender binary is integral to white supremacy. In 1989, Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality to illustrate the intersections of gender and race, as systems of power, in Black women’s experiences with the law. As Crenshaw initially posed, intersectionality elucidates the ways systems of power, including those based in race and gender, operate in tandem, through their many intersections. This is why our work for racial equity aims for much more than racial or gender parity in the workplace. We are working to dismantle systemic oppression and radically transform the culture of tech.
Tech companies continue to reject the invitation to build cultures that make space for marginalized people. This rejection is a reflection of the industry’s commitment to making those people invisible. That’s why at Code2040 we are invested in changing not only who is working in tech, but how folks are working in tech, and how tech is being worked. We envision a world shaped by collective human needs, that values life over profits. This is a world where trans, queer, Black and Latinx people are thriving, and are able to be in the joy of the fullest expression of their humanity. To build more free, more livable worlds, we have to tackle the tech industry’s consistent commitment to maintaining oppressive forces.