Career Path & Personal Life
After graduating from UC Berkeley, Mary accepted a job offer at Bell Labs in Columbus, Ohio, because she wanted to continue working on a project called UNIX. You see, her work with UNIX and Bell Labs actually started while she was working on getting her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. UNIX was a group of operating systems whose development lead to many things including but not limited to:
- The Internet
- Microsoft Windows
- Sun Microsystems
- Cisco routers
- Linux
While these accomplishments still affect our lives today, you will find it interesting that Mary's name does not appear in practically any infographic or website on UNIX or any of its listed descendants, leaving her name uncredited, and lost in the vastness of time.
During this time, Mary was working on Usenet Groups and publishing Usenet Service maps in ASCII to the internet to allow for the manual routing of data between networked computers. She also had two children with her first wife Karen, who later divorced her because Mary, then Mark, would often cross dress, and Karen didn't agree with many of Mary's views. In 1996, Bell Labs because the reasearch and Development side of Lucent, and in 2000 it turned into a company called Avaya.
It was during the period when Mary worked for Lucent that she founded EQUAL!, a LGBTQ employee group that fought for LGBTQ rights in the office and changed office policies to include transgender language. Today the EQUAL! group is an active human rescourses group at Nokia, the only company or website that attributes Mary's hard work. After the founding of EQUAL!, Mary was finally able to come out and transition from Mark to Mary, a name she felt much more comfortable being called. She started to become a major advocate for LGBTQ rights and Corperate Equal Opportunity policies everywhere, leading to her winning the Trailblazer Outie Award for her advocation for transgender health benefits and contributions to EO policy change, saying:
“I’d been advocating for corporate EO policies to include “gender identity and expression” for years. Once that was well under way, I shifted to advocating for Transgender Health Benefits.”
She continued her activism for Transgender rights, first at a personal level, taking all the necessary legal actions to become a woman, and undergoing medical changes to change her appearance to who she truly saw in the mirror. Next, her key role as an activist took her to 'local and national initiatives' such as:
- Lutherans Concerned
- NOW(National Organization of Women)
- Disputes over ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act)
- Out & Equal
- Her local LGBT Community Center
After all her efforts towards the LGBTQ community, she left Avaya to work at Bank One, now Chase Bank. Mary Ann, now a fully legal and accomplished women, moved back to San Diego to live with her girlfriend Katie and now happily runs her own self-made business called Red Ace Technical Solutions, which "offers the finest in Discount Web Hosting, E-mail, Information Technology, Training, and Gender services."
