Conway is notable for several technical achievements, including the Mead & Conway revolution in VLSI design, which incubated an emerging electronic design automation industry. She worked at IBM in the 1960s and is credited with the invention of generalised dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by most modern computer processors to improve performance.
Born and raised as a boy, Conway grew up in White Plains, New York. Although shy and experiencing gender dysphoria as a child, she became fascinated and engaged by astronomy (building a 6 inch reflector telescope one summer) and did well in math and science in high school. Conway entered MIT in 1955, earning high grades there. She attempted a gender transition in 1957-8, but this effort failed due to the medical climate at the time, and Conway left MIT in despair. After working as an electronics technician for several years, Conway resumed her education at Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, earning her B.S. and M.S.E.E. degrees in 1962 and 1963.
Conway was recruited by IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York in 1964. She was soon selected to join the architecture team designing an advanced supercomputer, working alongside John Cocke, Herbert Schorr, Ed Sussenguth, Fran Allen and other IBM researchers on the Advanced Computing Systems (ACS) project, inventing multiple-issue dynamic instruction scheduling while working there.
After learning of the pioneering research of Dr. Harry Benjamin in transgender treatment and realizing that a full gender transition was now possible, Conway sought his help and became his patient. After suffering from severe depression over her situation, Conway contacted Dr. Benjamin, who agreed to counsel her and prescribe hormones. Conway had made an earlier transition attempt in the late 1950s which failed due to the medical climate at the time. Under Dr. Benjamin's care, she began preparing for transition.
While struggling with life in a male role, Conway had been married to a woman and had two children. Under the legal constraints of the day, she was denied access to their children when she transitioned.
Although she hoped to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed to them that she was transsexual, and was planning on transitioning to a female gender role.
After retiring from her professorship in December 1998, she gradually came out to her friends as a transsexual woman in 1999, after she realized that the story of her IBM work might soon come out through the investigations of Mark Smotherman that were being prepared for a 2001 publication.
On completing her 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 went on to work at Memorex during 1969–1972 as a digital system designer and computer architect.
Conway joined Xerox PARC in 1973, where she led the "LSI Systems" group under Bert Sutherland.. Collaborating with Carver Mead of Caltech on 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 over 100 universities by 1983. The book and early courses were the beginning of the Mead & Conway revolution in VLSI system design.
In 1978, Conway served as visiting associate professor of EECS at MIT, teaching a now famous VLSI design course based on a draft of the Mead–Conway text. The course validated the new design methods and textbook, and established the syllabus and instructor’s guidebook used in later courses all around the world.
Among Conway’s contributions were invention of dimensionless, scalable design rules that greatly simplified chip design and design tools, and invention of a new form of internet-based infrastructure for rapid-prototyping and short-run fabrication of large numbers of chip designs. The new infrastructure was institutionalized as the MOSIS system in 1981. Since then, MOSIS has fabricated more than 50,000 circuit designs for commercial firms, government agencies, and research and educational institutions around the world.
In the early 1980s, Conway left Xerox to join DARPA, where she was a key architect of the Defense Department's Strategic Computing Initiative, a research program studying high-performance computing, autonomous systems technology, and intelligent weapons technology.
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". She retired from active teaching and research in 1998, as professor emerita at Michigan.
Conway has received a number of awards and distinctions:
When nearing retirement, Conway learned that the story of her early work at IBM might soon be revealed. She began quietly coming out in 1999 to friends and colleagues about her past gender transition , using her personal website to tell the story in her own words. Her story was then more widely reported in 2000 in profiles in Scientific American and the Los Angeles Times .
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'. She has worked to protect and expand the rights of transgendered people. She has provided direct and indirect assistance to numerous other transsexual women going through transition and maintains a website listing many successful post-transition transsexual people. Her website also provides current news related to transgender issues and information on sex reassignment surgery for transsexual women, facial feminization surgery, academic inquiries into the prevalence of transsexualism and transgender/transsexual issues in general.
She has been a prominent critic of the Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence theory of male-to-female transsexualism. She objected to the hypothesis that all transsexual women are motivated either by feminine homosexuality or autogynephilia.
Conway was a cast member in the first all-transgender performance of The Vagina Monologues, in Los Angeles in 2004 , and appeared in a LOGO-Channel documentary film about that event entitled Beautiful Daughters . She has also strongly advocated for equal opportunities and employment protections for transgender people in high-technology industry .
Conway lives with her husband Charlie on a 23 acre homestead in rural Michigan west of Ann Arbor. They enjoy sharing many interests and pastimes, and have been together since 1987.
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