DOMINIQUE DeGUZMAN
There are programmers, and then there are “brogrammers.” Dominique DeGuzman, a self-taught software engineer, is using her career success to battle a male-centric culture in her industry and to put a feminist and queer spin on science and technology. Dom started out in desktop hardware support, and used building and provisioning Linux machines as a jumping point into software and tools development. Now, she focuses on development pipeline, infrastructure monitoring and internal communications tools as a cloud services engineer at Twilio, where she also co-heads the firm´s Diversity & Inclusion program. As San Francisco city director of the professional organization Lesbians Who Tech, Dom wants to be the role model she herself once longed for. “I didn´t have any positive lesbian influences when I started as an engineer,” she says. But now that she has become connected with other lesbians in her industry, “I am happy to be on the front lines to bring not only more women but queer and lesbian women into the technical fields.” Just being visible as a lesbian in her industry has already made a huge impact. A story about her in Fortune spurred a lesbian engineer in Ohio to write her to say that her words made her feel less alone. “The short version: You´re not alone, and don´t give up.” -SJ
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