IBM apologizes 52 years later for firing a pioneering transgender engineer

IBM recently apologized to a transgender computer engineering pioneer – 52 years after she was fired.

Forbes magazine first published the story of 82-year-old Lyn Conway.

IBM fired Conway after revealing that she was a transgender.

Long before he became a well-respected professor at the University of Michigan, Conway was a young researcher at IBM. It was there, on August 29, 1968, that the IBM CEO fired her for illegal reasons today. After nearly 52 years, in a business that defines its current culture, IBM has apologized and sought forgiveness, ” Jeremy Alekandry wrote for Forbes.

The story has since been picked up internationally, including reports in the New York Times and the New York Post.

“I’ve been so hard to hold back my tears,” Lyn Conway told Forbes of her apology.

IBM honored Conway with an online gig recently.

“The apology came when Conway received an IBM Lifetime Achievement Award from Diane Gerson, the company’s senior vice president of human resources,” The Post noted.

“It was very unexpected,” Conway said in an interview with The New York Times. “It was amazing.”

Read the full story at Forbes.

Reports and workers say IBM is moving to cut thousands of jobs