US-RSE Pride Month Spotlight - Edith Windsor
Published: Jun 16, 2025
US-RSE’s DEI working group (DEI-WG) is proud to help US-RSE celebrate and participate in Pride Month. Throughout June, the US-RSE will spotlight LGBTQ+ individuals who have been involved in computing, science, engineering, and/or math, and have inspired our members through their accomplishments in their careers and their personal stories.
This week’s Pride Month spotlight features Edith Windsor
Did you know that the lead plaintiff in the US Supreme Court case that overturned Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 2013, leading to marriage being expanded to include same-sex couples, was a systems programmer at IBM and then a software development consultant in her own company?
Edith (Edie) Schlain was born in 1929 in Philadelphia. She graduated from Temple in 1950, where she met her future husband, Saul Windsor, who she married in 1951 and divorced in 1952. She later earned a master’s in math from NYU in 1957. She then joined IBM, where she worked for 16 years in senior technical and management positions related to systems architecture and implementation of operating systems and language processors. As AnitaB.org describes, she started as a mainframe programmer and later rose to “the company’s highest technical rank, Senior Systems Programmer, on the strength of her top-notch debugging skills. ‘They couldn’t fix the code because they couldn’t read it,’ Edith told a journalist. ‘But I could read code until it wrapped around the room and back again. A guy I was working with said, ‘give this woman a roll of toilet paper, she can do anything.’” During this time, in 1963, she met and began dating Thea Spyer, who asked Edith to marry her in 1967, and they began living together six months later.
In her professional life, as AnitaB.org continues to describe, “Edith left IBM in 1975, becoming the founding president of PC Classics, a consulting firm specializing in major software development projects. During this time, Edith also helped countless LGBTQ groups become tech literate. ‘I computerized everybody,’ she quipped. ‘I got calls from gay organizations that wanted to computerize their mail systems. All of my IBM experience continues throughout my life.’ Her love of computing was personal, too — she was the owner of the very first IBM-PC delivered in New York City.” In 1993, when New York City first began registering domestic partnerships between same-sex couples, they registered. Because the US did not allow same-sex marriage, they traveled to Toronto in 2007 where they were married. Two years later, Thea died, and left her estate to Edie, but because the US did not recognize their marriage, Edie had to pay taxes on the estate. This was the cause of her lawsuit that led to Section 3 of DOMA being ruled unconstitutional, enabling same sex marriage to become legal, after which the US government refunded the estate tax.
Again quoting AnitaB.org, “Edith was recognized by the National Computing Conference as an operating systems pioneer. In 2013, she was the Grand Marshal of the New York City LGBT Pride March and a runner-up for Time’s Person of the Year.” She died in 2017, and was eulogized by Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama said about her, “America’s long journey towards equality has been guided by countless small acts of persistence, and fueled by the stubborn willingness of quiet heroes to speak out for what’s right. Few were as small in stature as Edith Windsor — and few made as big a difference to America.”