7 LGBTQ+ Icons in STEM You Should Know

Pride Month is a good time to do more than wave a rainbow flag. It's a time to learn names. Here are seven LGBTQ+ people who shaped science and technology — some you'll recognise, others you should.

1. Tim Cook — The Executive Who Changed What a CEO Could Look Like

When Tim Cook became CEO of Apple in 2011, he inherited one of the most scrutinised leadership roles in the world. He grew it into the most valuable company on earth. In 2014, he came out publicly in a piece for Bloomberg Businessweek, becoming the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company — a quiet, deliberate act from a notoriously private man that carried enormous weight.

Recently, Apple announced Cook will step down as CEO on 1 September, transitioning to executive chairman. His legacy is immense — not just in products and market cap, but in the simple, radical visibility of being out at the top.

2. Nergis Mavalvala — The Physicist Who Heard the Universe Speak

In 2016, a team of scientists detected gravitational waves for the first time in human history — ripples in the fabric of spacetime, caused by two black holes colliding over a billion light years away. It confirmed a prediction Einstein had made 100 years earlier. Nergis Mavalvala was part of that team.

A queer Pakistani-American astrophysicist, Mavalvala is now Dean of MIT's School of Science — the first woman to hold the role. She describes herself as an "out, queer person of colour" and is open about the fact that she failed her PhD candidacy exam twice before going on to help rewrite our understanding of the cosmos. She received a MacArthur Genius Award in 2010, was named LGBTQ Scientist of the Year in 2014, and is, in every measurable sense, one of the most important physicists alive.

3. Ana Arriola — The Designer Who Has Shaped Everything You Touch

Before most people had heard the word "emoji," Ana Arriola (she/they) was at Adobe helping bring them into existence. She went on to Apple as product line manager for the original iPhone, then to Sony and PlayStation, then to Samsung as Global VP of UX and Design — where her work included the Samsung Frame television, one of the first screens designed to look like a painting when not in use. More recently, she has led the development of ethical AI frameworks at Meta and Microsoft, working on questions of bias, inclusion, and what responsible design looks like at the scale of billions of users.

Arriola describes herself as "a queer mother of three, Latinx lesbian of trans and nonbinary experience," and she brings that intersectional lens directly to her work. Across a 25-year career spanning hardware, software, UX, and AI ethics, her core conviction has stayed consistent: every experience should be human, simple, and authentic. She was named one of the most influential LGBTQ+ people in tech by Business Insider in 2019 — not for any single product, but for the cumulative weight of what she's built and who she's brought along with her.

4. Lesley Carhart — The Threat Hunter Protecting Critical Infrastructure

Most people don't think much about what keeps water treatment plants, power grids, and hospital systems from being taken down by state-sponsored hackers. Lesley Carhart (they/them) does — it's their job.

As Technical Director of Industrial Incident Response at Dragos, Carhart specialises in defending operational technology environments: the industrial control systems that run physical infrastructure. They're one of very few people on earth who does this work full time, and one of the most respected voices in cybersecurity globally — named DEF CON Hacker of the Year in 2020 and a SANS Life Achievement Award recipient in 2022. An openly nonbinary and trans person, they are also a vocal advocate for LGBTQ+ inclusion in the industry. Based in Melbourne since late 2024 — practically a neighbour.

5. Shrouk El-Attar — The Engineer Who Dances in Protest

Shrouk El-Attar (she/they) arrived in the UK from Egypt as a child refugee in 2007, two years ahead of her peers academically. When she applied to university, she was denied entry because asylum seekers were classified as international students — and then simultaneously forbidden to work to pay those fees. She campaigned to change that policy, and has since helped secure access to higher education at over 70 UK universities.

In between: an electronics engineering degree, research at Cardiff University, roles at Intel and NASA (contributing to the Gateway lunar space station), and the founding of her own consultancy. She was named one of the BBC's 100 Most Influential Women in the World in 2018 and the UN's Young Woman of the Year. She is also a belly dancer and drag performer whose act, "Dancing Queer," raises funds for the legal defence of LGBTQ+ people in Egypt. Queer. Arab. Refugee. Engineer. Activist. Performer. There isn't really a box for her, which is exactly the point.

6. Anna Lytical — The Queen Who Makes Code Glamorous

Anna Lytical is the drag persona of Billy Jacobson, a software engineer at Google, who started a YouTube and Twitch channel dedicated to teaching coding — in full drag, with makeup tutorials as arrays and wigs as data structures. The tagline: changing the world one queer line of code at a time.

What she's doing isn't just entertaining — it's deliberate. LGBTQ+ people are underrepresented in tech, and the imagery of who belongs there doesn't tend to include drag queens. Anna Lytical makes visible what mainstream tech culture keeps invisible: that you can be flamboyant, queer, and a brilliant engineer, and those things aren't in tension. If you've ever felt like tech wasn't built for someone like you, her channel is worth your time.

7. Sophie Wilson — The Engineer Behind Every Smartphone You've Ever Held

Sophie Wilson is one of the most important engineers of the 20th century, and most people have never heard her name. In the early 1980s, she designed the instruction set for the ARM processor — the architecture that now sits inside virtually every smartphone, tablet, and embedded device on the planet. Billions of devices. Your phone, right now, is running her work.

Wilson is a trans woman who transitioned in 1994 and went on to work at Broadcom, where she contributed to the system chip at the heart of the Raspberry Pi. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering. The scale of her contribution to modern computing is almost impossible to overstate — and her name deserves to be as well known as the people who simply sold the products her work made possible.