LGBTQ+ In Technology

In honor of Pride Month we wanted to highlight some important figures in the field of technology who were also members of the LGBTQ+ community! These innovators and creators brought forth new technologies and perspectives that today are often overlooked or taken for granted, but are crucial to our world nonetheless. Take a look for yourself: 

Megan Smith

Megan Smith is the former Chief Technology Officer for the United States of America, and worked as part of the Obama administration from 2014 - 2017. During this time, Smith focused on how technology policy, data, and innovation could advance the nation. This work included leading teams on the public-private program TechHire, the Computer Science for All initiative, and the Image of STEM campaigns.

Prior to becoming CTO, Smith worked at Google for more than a decade (2003-2014), eventually rising to become VP of New Business Development. Here Smith made numerous contributions and key acquisitions that led to Google Earth, Google Maps, and Picasa. Smith later took over as General Manager of Google’s philanthropic arm.

Smith is now the CEO and Founder of shift7, working on tech-forward, inclusive innovation for faster impact on systemic economic, social, and environmental challenges. Smith was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017 for leading technological teams and efforts to increase diversity and inclusion across STEM industries both national and international, and is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations (2018).

Alan Turing

Alan Turning is generally regarded as the ‘father’ of theoretical computing science and artificial intelligence. Turning worked as a cryptanalyst during WWII and worked at Britain’s codebreaking center that produced Ultra intelligence. Here, he played a key role in the development of a technique to decipher encrypted German messages, helping Allied forces defeat the Nazis. You might know his story from the 2014 film The Imitation Game. 

After his WWII codebreaking, Turing went on to National Physical Laboratory where he designed the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. He later joined Newman’s Computing Machine Laboratory where he helped design the Manchester computers. 

Tragically Turing was arrested in 1952 for homosexuality and was given hormone treatment as an alternative to prison. Turing died two years later. Today, the “Alan Turing law” (passed in the UK in 2017) retroactively pardons men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts.

Audrey Tang

Born in Taiwan, Audrey Tang is a self-taught programmer who was learning Perl at age 12, launching startups at 15, and working in Silicon Valley at 19. Tang is well known for initiating and leading the Pugs project, which developed and implemented the Perl 6 scripting language. Tang also helped start the Perl Archive Toolkit (PAT), a cross-platform packaging and deployment tool for Perl 5. PAT was during Tang’s work with CPAN, where Tang initiated over 100 Perl projects from 2001 - 2006. 

Beyond this, Tang has built a political career that began working with the prime minister on building a media literacy curricula for Taiwan's schools. Following this, Tang was named minister without portfolio of digital affairs in 2016 and later digital minister, being placed in charge of helping government agencies communicate policy goals and managing information published by the government, both via digital means. At age 35, Tang became the youngest minister without portfolio in Taiwanese history. As of 2017, Tang was working on sharing economy software that would facilitate the free exchange of resources in abundance instead of the ride-sharing and peer hotel applications for which the technology is known.