LGBTQ Engineers
Engineers are inventors, designers, builders and testers of the machinery and functioning equipment and applications that we utilize in our day-to-day lives. There are many branches of engineering present today, including mechanical, computer, electrical, nuclear, civil, planning, and more.
Given this wide variety of engineering professionals, it is not surprising that LGBTQ individuals are a prevalent and high profile part of the community. Recent surveys have shown that more than 5% of engineers worldwide publicly identify as LGBTQ, though until recently this group has been invisible and silent. The profession has a reputation of being a conservative, male-dominated professions with high barriers to entry and intolerance to diversity.
Many LGBTQ interest groups have been formed to change this historical reputation. These include InterEngineering in the UK and EngiQueers in Canada. In the United States, there is the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientists and Technical Professionals (NOGLSTP), NuclearPride, 500 Queer Scientists, LGBT STEM and oSTEM. Surprisingly, lesbian engineers make up a large part of the community of notable LGBTQ individuals on our list. Also present is a significant presence of transgender engineers, including Audrey Tang of Taiwan, Sophie Wilson, Kate Stone of Great Britain, and Mary Ann Horton, Alexia Massalin, and Dana Contreras of the United States.
In fact, did you know that transgender engineer Mary Ann Horton is one of the principal founders and designers of Usenet and the internet, and invented the computer program coding that is the forerunner to email attachments and is used around the world today?
Austria
- Juergen Maier, Siemens UK
Canada
- Paul Cadario, engineer/banker
- Sara Diamond, OCAD University
- Patrick Keilty, University of Toronto
Chile
- Luis Larrain, Fundacion Iguales
Great Britain
- Lord John Browne, BP
- Peter Landin, University of London
- Mark McBride-Wright, safety engineer
- Peter Murray, Arup
- Kate Stone, Cambridge University
- Christopher Strachey, National Physcial Laboratory
- Alan Turing, computer engineer
- Sophie Wilson, Broadcom
Italy
- Leonardo Da Vinci, mechanical engineer
Mexico
- Elena Rodriguez-Falcon, New Model in Technology and Engineering (NMiTE)
Nigeria
- Nebeolisa Okwudili, chemical engineer
Sweden
- Allan Hellman, activist
Taiwan
- Audrey Tang, Pugs project
Turkey
- Orkut Buyukkokten, Club Nexis
United States
- Jack Andraka, inventor
- Christine Bland, Lockheed Martin
- Dana Contreras, systems engineer, Twitter
- Lynn Conway, University of Michigan
- Tim Cook, Apple
- Denice Denton, University of California
- Gene Dermody, software engineer
- Rochelle Diamond, mechanical engineer
- Michael Falk, Johns Hopkins
- Mary Ann Horton, computer engineer
- Jon 'Maddog' Hall, Linux International
- Kimberlee Kearfott, University of Michigan
- Jay Keasling, chemical engineer, bioengineer
- Pierre Charles L'Enfant, civil engineer
- David Lerman, One Degree Inc, Ten Acre Systems
- Alexia Massalin, MicroUnity Systems Engineering
- Dana McCallum, Twitter
- Donna Riley, Purdue University
- Lauren Scott, electrical engineer and politician
- Darrell Silver, Thinkful
- Michael Todd, University of California San Diego
- Edith Windsor, IBM
- Louise Young, Raytheon
See Also
- LGBTQ Biologists and Chemists
- The Fascinating World of LGBTQ Astronomers, Astrophysicists, and Cosmologists
- LGBTQ Physicists
- LGBTQ Mathematicians
