Today’s LGBTQ+ Technology Leaders

The previous pieces in this series have examined some of the foundational LGBTQIA+ figures in the history and evolution of computer science. First, the contributions made to modern programming by Christopher Strachey and Peter Landin. Secondly, three transgender women who changed technology, especially computer hardware: Lynn Conway, Sophie Wilson, and Mary Ann Horton.

This piece takes a more contemporary and forward-looking approach, shining a spotlight on three LGBTQIA+ women who are, in different ways, shaping the present and the future of digital technology and business.

Audrey Tang

Like Peter Landin before her, Audrey Tang takes a critical view of the impact that computing has had on the world, especially in the context of China’s surveillance state and the USA’s growing problems with state-sponsored disinformation. Unlike Landin, however, she views her position as a computer scientist as one of agency, with a means of creating a better world.

It helps, of course, that she is Digital Minister of Taiwan. In a somewhat paradoxical move for an avowed anarchist, Tang became Taiwan’s youngest ever cabinet minister in 2016, aged 35. Despite her political views, Tang sees her position in Taiwan’s government as enabling her to effect change for the good, something which her prodigious career has born out.

Her meteoric rise began when she started learning to code aged eight. By 12, she was learning Perl, a language on which she would go on to have an influential role in developing. At fifteen, she had founded her own start-up - a consultancy of 10 Perl developers carrying out software development contracts.

Tang transitioned to female at the age of 25, in part as a rejection of the notion of categorising people. Her political career began in 2014, when she provided technical support for a protest against Taiwan’s ruling party of the time, Kuomintang’s (KMT) attempt to fast-track a trade deal with China. Soon afterwards, the KMT government itself invited Tang to join a project to determine how to regulate Uber, which led to vTaiwan - a means of building popular consensus through open-source software for issues like regulation.

Tang has been a leading figure in the open source community, especially in Perl. She led the Pugs project, a joint effort between the Perl and Haskell communities, to implement Perl 6. Openness and transparency also inform her approach to her public office: she publishes the minutes of every meeting she is involved in, and regularly consults with the public on policy matters in order to lessen the divide between the public and the state.

Recently, Tang has gained widespread acclaim for creating a system to publicise mask availability levels at government pharmacies in Taiwan during the coronavirus pandemic.

Arlan Hamilton

Hamilton began life as a music tour manager, before becoming interested in the idea of launching a dating app. As soon as she looked beneath the surface of the tech start-up world, however, she discovered that 90% of all venture capital investment goes to white men.

Setting out to challenge this, Hamilton founded her own investment fund - Backstage Capital - while she herself was homeless. Backstage Capital invests in companies founded by people who Hamilton feels reflect aspects of her own identity that are underserved by the investment community: women, people of colour, and LGBTQ+ founders. In 2018, Hamilton launched an accelerator, Backstage Studio, across Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, and London.

As of 2020, Backstage had invested over $7m in 130 different companies. Hamilton’s book, It’s About Damn Time: How To Turn Being Underestimated Into Your Greatest Advantage was published in the same year.

‘90 percent of venture capital was going to White men… [That] means that 10 percent of venture capital is split (unequally) among all of the other types of people in society. As a Black gay woman who had been excited to enter into the exciting world of innovation as an entrepreneur, I was more than disappointed to discover that something that had been sold to me as a meritocracy was actually a microcosm of the worst of society’s biases.’ - Arlan Hamilton, It’s About Damn Time

Some of Backstage Capital’s successes to date include Career Karma, an app that helps match people to appropriate job training programs and coding bootcamps, and The Grand, a group coaching platform helping people navigate “transitions at the intersection of work and life”.

Hamilton is, however, still swimming upstream in an industry that is overwhelmingly dominated by straight white males. She attempted to launch a $36m fund aimed at supporting Black female entrepreneurs in 2018, but the initiative collapsed after an anchor investor pulled out.

And, illustrative of how heavily the scales are tipped against underestimated people in technology and investment, Backstage Capital has struggled in 2022. In March, the firm was forced to pivot to only making new investments in its existing portfolio, before downsizing substantially in June.

“This could have been avoided if the system we work within were different,” Hamilton said on her Your First Million podcast, announcing the news. “You gotta ask these LPs… these people who ask me, ‘How can I be helpful,?’ And I say ‘Invest in our fund,’ and I never hear from them again.”

Ana Arriola

Ana Arriola has worked at Meta, Sony, Samsung, Adobe and Apple, and is currently Director of Design & Research for Microsoft's Physical Operations Cloud (PhysOps). Her focus in recent years has been human-centric, ethical design of products, which many of her positions (particularly at Meta) centred on the design of Artificial Intelligence products.

During her time at Apple, Arriola was part of the team that designed the original iPhone. Her core design principles - be human, keep it simple, and be authentic - shape and influence product teams and start-up cultures throughout the world.

Arriola was born male, but knew from the age of six that she was female. She transitioned some time after 2016, citing “fear for [her] 26-year career and financial implications for [her] family’s future” as reasons for not having done so sooner. She now describes herself as a “Queer Latine Mother of Trans and Non-binary Experience.”

In a 2016 interview, Arriola took a swipe at the same “unfortunate bro-culture” among investment managers that Arlan Hamilton was contending with at the same time, decrying the lack of “Queer VCs and funds” with the exception of 500.co and Women’s Startup Lab and, later, Backstage Capital.

Arriola has mentored LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs as part of her work at Stanford, and has founded several start-ups herself including Minimalisms, a product design consultancy researching what she calls “new necessities”.

She feels that her identity gives her an edge in her work, telling Tech Inclusion in 2017 that she had learned “how [she] can apply that uniqueness [she has] as a person into entrepreneurship.” Her philosophy on this front resembles Arlan Hamilton’s; both consciously frame the fact that their identities are overlooked by the business world as a strength, rather than a weakness.

Reverberations

Since the days of Alan Turing, computer science as a field has been shaped by the work of LGBTQ+ people. As Turing’s own story, as well as the firing of Lynn Conway and the exclusionary bro-culture of investment identified by Arlan Hamilton and Ana Arriola show, the sector itself has been slow to acknowledge, appreciate and accept this contribution.

The three leaders that this essay has explored are upending this paradigm. Arlan Hamilton and Ana Arriola have proactively set out to provide mentorship and investment towards the LGBTQIA+ community, while Audrey Tang has become an icon among a generation of Asian activists and developers breaking free of the region’s more conservative views. Backstage Capital’s recent struggles, however, are a reminder of how much institutional change is still required.

Arlan Hamilton herself once said of her work: “This isn’t going to be contained to just the amount of people I can get a check to. This is going to have reverberations through whomever can see it—whoever can feel represented in this.” The reverberations that she, Tang and Arriola have created will be felt as keenly in technology’s future as those of Christopher Strachey, Peter Landin, Lynn Conway, Sophie Wilson and Mary Ann Horton have been felt in its past.

References & further reading

• https://www.businessinsider.com/most-powerful-lgbtq-people-in-tech-2019-2

• https://www.wired.com/story/how-taiwans-unlikely-digital-minister-hacked-the-pandemic/

• https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g00837/digital-minister-audrey-tang-taiwan’s-genius-and-her-unique-past.html

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang#Political_career

• Hamilton, A. 2020 It’s About Damn Time: How To Turn Being Underestimated Into Your Greatest Advantage

• https://www.fastcompany.com/90475377/queer-50-arlan-hamilton

• https://backstagecapital.com/

• https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-himi-arlan-hamilton-backstage-capital-20190512-story.html

• https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/26/backstage-capital-cuts-majority-of-staff-after-pausing-net-new-investments/

• https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/22/its-time-for-lps-to-take-more-responsibility-in-the-fight-for-economic-equality/

• https://blog.techinclusion.co/put-your-squirrel-suit-n-and-jump-off-the-cliff-7d13837b277c

• https://techiesproject.com/ana-arriola/

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/arriola/