Sad to see this canceled and especially at the last minute.
Since DEI imploded most companies won’t touch anything with a 100 ft pole that looks like it might go anywhere near that, and seems like that didn’t help on funding and sponsors.
This always seemed like a good event and only ever heard positive things about it. The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this, and thus it would appear this may be collateral damage.
For context, the first Grace Hopper Celebration was 1994, and had been held for the last 20 consecutive years. Long before DEI.
But when the powers that be are intent to kill off "DEI", and their definition includes anything related to women, this is what happens. Too many business cowards don't want to have problems with their merger, acquisition, IPO, FCC license, etc for supporting celebrating a great American like this, just because she was a woman.
There was definitely gender-based affirmative action benefitting women in 1994 - the term DEI is newer than that (as far as I'm aware), but the concept is definitely not.
According to the Wikipedia article on the event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper_Celebration_of_Wo...), "In 1994, Anita Borg and Telle Whitney founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. With the initial idea of creating a conference by and for women computer scientists, Borg and Whitney met over dinner, with a blank sheet of paper, having no idea how to start a conference, and started to plan out their vision. The first Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing was held in Washington, D.C., in June 1994, and brought together 500 technical women.".
Having a specific conference for women in computing is definitely a DEI concern; from the very beginning, the entire point of having a formal celebration of Grace Hopper was to be a locus for this female-specific conference. Grace Hopper's importance to this conference is that she was a woman, not that she invented FLOW-MATIC.
It’s not really that simple. Read some of the accounts of the conference from recent years. The conference was falling apart even when companies were sponsoring it. I don’t know about last year’s conference but before that there were a lot of bad experiences and reports that it was turning into more of a job fair than tech conference, but even that wasn’t going well.
It was also getting very expensive. When a conference has a long list of sponsors and tickets also start at $600 minimum, it’s hard to keep that going in a year like this when everyone is dealing with large token spend budgets.
They likely could have survived with a right-sized event but they aimed higher than their budget allowed and hoped the money would appear at the last minute. It did not.
> But when the powers that be are intent to kill off "DEI", and their definition includes anything related to women, this is what happens.
It's the other way around -- they want to do away with anything to do with women, and they used this DEI boogeyman to get everyone scared enough to go along with it.
While cynical, there is a lot of truth to your statement. I wish the activist type would realize that they are actually being used, but it appears there isn't much chance they will ever listen to the old dogs in this game.
From what was reported there was a broad reduction of interest from sponsors. Speculation, but the late cancellation very much sounds like there was an effort to find a main sponsor to make up the gap but no corporate was willing to step up and just be the primary sponsor to fund what was needed.
Corporate lawyers now broadly advise their companies against putting any money towards demographic-specific initiatives due to the risks of being sued for discrimination.
Buying a booth at an event would probably be seen as fine but I can only imagine pitches to be a title sponsor were met with “don’t touch this” advice from corporate lawyers.
It doesn’t say anyone pulled out at the last minute.
I think we’re trying to put on a very big conference and hoping that big sponsors would come through at the last minute to make the numbers work.
They’ve had some problems in the recent years. It even made NPR headlines for cops having to show up. Everyone who hasn’t heard of the conference until now is assuming the sponsors are entirely to blame but the conference was not doing well for a couple years.
>The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this
Oh but they were about this. This is the common trend of people thinking that "the good ones" are implicitly exempted from their general and sweeping attacks on $THING. C.f. the hardline anti-immigration voter who thinks that the guy who mows their lawn obviously won't be included in the crackdowns. If you attack the whole concept of DEI (as many did – not necessarily you), then you are in fact attacking events celebrating the achievements of women in fields where they're poorly represented.
>C.f. the hardline anti-immigration voter who thinks that the guy who mows their lawn obviously won't be included in the crackdowns.
huh, that's pretty bizarre, at least here in Australia (where in recent years immigration has exploded to 2x ~ 3x that of the USA), all the anti-immigration voters are sincerely hoping the guy who mows their lawn grew up across town where his wife's sister now lives.
the crackdowns are for the economic migrants just taking a lifestyle arbitrage
ultimately, immigration into large developed nations is an act of altruism, which, like most things in life, cannot scale indefinitely (much to the chagrin of business owners, women, arts students, etc.) - which is not nice, but is true.
A hardline anti-immigration voter is probably less likely to employ a likely-illegal-immigrant guy to mow their lawn than someone who is pro-immigration.
Similarly, someone who has actually attended the Grace Hopper conference is more likely to be pro-DEI than someone who has never attended and doesn't care about it happening.
> The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this, and thus it would appear this may be collateral damage.
This is not the case at all. There have been ample people complaining about this stuff for years. While there are some people who are upset at various policies for other reasons there really is a battery of people who just genuinely don't want to see minority representation in the workplace. Oftentimes these people dress up their true complaints in softer ones but you really can see people like Chris Rufo pushing for a world where minorities are not in positions of power or authority.
I have personally observed people at my workplace (Google) complaining about any funded attendance at Grace Hopper as discrimination against men.
> Since DEI imploded most companies won’t touch anything with a 100 ft pole that looks like it might go anywhere near that, and seems like that didn’t help on funding and sponsors.
That GHC has had a lot of problems in the past several years. The ticket prices were getting excessive and the conference itself was wandering off course.
Even the current website looks like something that would be hard to justify under most conference travel budget requests: It’s hard to find the actually technical content among the speakers, even though they’re claiming 700+ speakers.
Some of the top selling points are finding employers who are hiring and growing your network. Most companies have tightened up their conference budgets to focus on educational material, not events focus on recruiting people to other companies. Everyone knows conferences will have companies recruiting, but when recruiting is one of the primary selling points it’s more job fair than conference.
The conference has also been problematic on many levels in the past few years. It made news headlines in 2023 for conflict about too many men showing up and arguments about whether or not they were really transgender. The police have been called. They’ve been flirting with political ideologies like Thiel-associated key speakers trying to make the theme of the event encouraging young women to drop out of college. The operations have been a mess from a lot of the reports.
Everyone in these comments is assuming anti-DEI, but everything I heard about the conference was a growing dumpster fire and cash grab for years. I think they finally collapsed when they tried to grow too big after years of bad experiences for their sponsors combined with companies facing increasing AI spend who weren’t interested in spending thousands of dollars to send employees to a conference where recruiting to other jobs was one of the main selling points.
DEI didn’t implode; it’s not an implosion when it’s shot at from the outside by malicious actors intent on destroying something they don’t understand and can only kneejerk react to out of unreasoning fear.
This isn’t collateral, this was the plan, the planners were just too stupid to see the natural consequences of their plan. See also the price of diesel.
The implication here that the DEI movement had done nothing wrong is rather naive… it wasn’t all bad, but there was a lot of bad things happening to answer for.
When Jim Whitehurst left Red Hat, he was replaced by Paul Cormier, a complete wokee. Cormier got DEI fever and put in place a big corporate framework, led by a newly crowned VP, complete with staff.
DEI affinity groups were established, by ancestry, sexual orientation, veteran status, physical ability, neurodivergence, etc. The groups got t shirts and air time on company calls. Chatter on internal mailing lists shot upwards, often becoming political firestorms.
CEO Cormier got even crazier and started saying things about maybe not belonging at Red Hat if you didn’t buy into the complete DEI koolaid. The entire corporate leadership was using pronouns in email by then.
I was a member of the military veterans DEI group. I appreciated the t shirts and once got a backpack from a contest. It wasn’t all bad.
Some of it was overreach, and it grated on some people. But there was a glorious counter move in the works.
There was a Jewish guy that didn’t like having DEI thrust upon the company. Assessing his pool of allies, he started some quiet conversations and soon applied for a new DEI subgroup, “Jews and Judeo-Christian values”. The corporate DEI sponsors were caught off guard and approved of the group. I got to go to a DEI conference in Alabama on the company dime, a week long kumbaya fest with nice eats at a snazzy resort. Company funding was good!
A checkpoint on where Red Hat was at the time: the lead spokesperson for the Red Hat Women’s group was a muscular transgender person. That didn’t seem crazy in the context.
As the J&JCV group, we got air time and were able to give voice to our preferred messaging. Our ranks included a gay guy that was drummed out of the LGBT group for his airing of occasional conservative viewpoints. He was as welcome in our community as anyone.
Finally, the DEI leadership took a closer look and decommissioned our J&JCV subgroup. We tried to argue and appeal, and I believe we won the battle of logical arguments, but that was of no consequence. We lost our seat at the table.
It may have seemed bleak, but the winds of change were blowing. CEO Cormier was removed by IBM, after very little time in office.
Organic actions were wearing away at DEI, also. A prominent subgroup leader was taking lengthy ‘mental health breaks’ of week long duration— then boasting about it on mailing lists and encouraging others to do the same! Such things are not sustainable.
As I retired a few years later, DEI was operating at a reasonable level. Minority communities ( notably the excellent and long running Black Red Hatters group ) were bringing appropriate, positive messaging and were demonstrating the true power of diversity. Women’s groups were doing a good job of showcasing women in Tech, etc. I don’t remember anything truly crazy in my last year.
I'm lucky enough to have received one of Grace' nanosecond wires, when .. as a fresh young squib .. I attended one of her lectures and got one handed to me by the Admiral herself.
She was a huge influence on me - as a white male tech nerd - and I have long had a huge interest in women in tech, from Grace to Margaret Hamilton to Jeri Ellsworth and Anouk Wipprecht and more. Jeri's demonstration of her self-made transistors and work rebuilding a tunneling electron microscope were fascinating and rank among the most entertaining things I've seen in a hackerspace this century. Anouks' mad fashiontech excursions are positively exciting. There are many other women technologists who deserve our interest.
So its pretty unfortunate that GCH won't happen this year. I hope there are budding young squibs out there who won't see this as de-motivating with regards to their entry into the technology worlds.
Most students are probably on trips paid for by others. Many of those groups would probably not be keen to fund an itinerary-free trip to Irvine California for a few days. Even if the students were purported to want to impromptu organize.
They were advertising tickets three days before they announced everything was cancelled: https://archive.ph/Uimqj
> What happens to my in-person or virtual registration fee?
> Information regarding GHC registration and other financial matters will be communicated to you promptly once we obtain a clearer understanding of AnitaB.org ’s financial condition.
I wonder if people are confused about their repositioning.
An AnitaB.org press release dated April 24, 2025, stated its mission as:
> “to get women in tech skilled, hired, promoted, paid, and funded so that they can thrive, lead, and drive innovation for a more equitable and sustainable future.”
The current mission page instead says:
> “to get our community in tech skilled, hired, promoted, paid, and funded, so they can thrive, lead, and drive innovation for a more impartial and sustainable future.”
It's really hard to tell from their current mission statement who "our community" is.
Since DEI became a curse word, you cannot say you do anything for women anymore. I think it's pretty clear who the community still is, but with snowflakes running the government, wording suffers.
I so hate that trying to help historically disadvantaged groups some extra help is considered bad. Like I get not making a group extra powered, but to help women in tech or research into Black prenatal care just seems absurd.
I submitted it, then did a search for the domain. Noticed that there was discussion on a previous submission, thought that was worth pointing out. ChrisArchitect is pretty good at this, but sometimes I do it myself.
Grace Brewster Hopper (née Murray; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral.[1] She was a pioneer of computer programming. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and used this theory to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language, which was a major influence on COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. She was also one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer. She is credited with writing the first computer manual, "A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator", and is often credited with creating the first compiler.
didn't find anything controversial about her in wikipedia
I believe they posted "often credited with creating the first compiler", which is still true in this case. Interesting choice of a counter-example for a few reasons, though.
The conference was something else. It was a mix of recruiting, networking, and speakers. It had become really expensive and had some problems in recent years.
What does discrimination against men look like and what are the impacts on men when programs try to manage structural misogyny but end up w something else? I feel like a lot of men feel they are being discriminated against (even young boys in 1st and second grade say they girls get preferential treatment even when it’s clear they are the ones being disruptive), so my question is…where is this feeling coming from? (I’m not a man so I dont get it)
Why it may have lacked the funding to continue operations:
"Last year, Women Who Code, a nonprofit that got its start in California, closed because of a lack of funding. AnitaB.org, which brings together women in tech at its annual Grace Hopper Celebration, cut its workforce in 2024 and pointed to a downturn in corporate DEI investments." - "Why Big Tech is pulling back [from DEI efforts]" [2025] (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-02-15/google-and...)
"I've seen companies who have rebranded their diversity, equity, inclusion as colleague engagement, as listening and empowerment, or and whatever else, I've seen many different iterations, and I think a lot of organizations... [want] to get to a place where they can hide their activity..." ... "Those organizations want to continue doing the work, but they no longer want attention for that work. And so to try to, like, hide it in some ways, and we're in a very unprecedented time right now, nothing is normal right now." ... "Well, basically, corporations interpreted the ADA to say, like, I don't have to offer any... And then you have this three executive orders around DEI, and companies are falling over themselves to comply in advance without any legal mandate for compliance." ... "I just saw a New York Times article that was published a list of a hundred and ninety-nine words that the Trump administration is targeting, words like diversity and inclusion, but also things like bias, stereotypes, underrepresented, underserved, and many more words. They're flagging these words, they're removing them from websites, they're investigating, delaying, denying grants and funding." - Bo Young Lee, President of Research & Advisory for AnitaB.org [2025] (https://voices.berkeley.edu/podcast/dei-not-doa-part-1 | locally AI extracted transcript: https://pastebin.ca/5Mmy5Q6deu)
What scares me for the future of my children is that people cheer or blend in, hide, give up. All this repression is helped from multitude of directions, actively or passively, but helped. And the intentional confrontation, seeking it, is increasingly the norm while standing up for it, the protective confrontation is disappearing into the shades, under the grass, not to be seen, go dormant or in some instances, die. This will not end well.
Who does AnitaB.org actually support or advocate for?
Their "Our Mission" page refers only to the perfectly vague "our community", never once describing what that is. Nor does their landing page. Their "Our History" page says that the organisation started out to support women in the tech industry, but then describes several name changes, eventually dropping all use of the words "woman" or "women" and switching to the user of "individuals" without explanation or elaboration. It reads like a perfectly choreographed PR "product" designed to maximise deniability of... something. But what?
Grace Hopper may not be a casualty of the DEI backlash alone. It may also be a casualty of a hiring market that no longer needs large-scale recruiting events.
You clearly do not work in Tech. Grace Hopper has been around for decades, and companies have understood how important it is for furthering their industries.
This is absolutely the US Gov to blame for its DEI attacks and threats.
The first thing I think about when I hear GHC is the gaslighting. For years I was prodded about that I should go. Men are absolutely welcome. Everyone is welcome, etc.
I never felt that I was actually welcome. And I don't have to be. It's not for me, and it doesn't have to be. I answered women inviting me that no, that wasn't made for me, have fun though.
Then mass layoffs happened, and men who lost their jobs, or looking for their first job, went.
Suddenly everything flipped. Keynote was basically "what the fuck are all you men doing here, taking the space of women?".
There are no isolated phenomena. There are no accidents. It apples to everything. Times are changing. Priorities are changing. The party is coming to an end. People are getting real. It's like the world suddenly progressed past it's childhood or waking from a musical dream.
The courtesy smiles, the pretentive presentations, the sale talk, the polite social customs, the diplomacy, the power due to knowledge, weaponry, currency fixations, - all will face the concrete realities. Water recedes exposing the naked, boisterous economies. The zero-carbon evangelists run to Russia for diesel and to China for minerals or they get extinct, unable to adapt and sitting on their presumptive glory.
Sad to see this canceled and especially at the last minute.
Since DEI imploded most companies won’t touch anything with a 100 ft pole that looks like it might go anywhere near that, and seems like that didn’t help on funding and sponsors.
This always seemed like a good event and only ever heard positive things about it. The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this, and thus it would appear this may be collateral damage.
For context, the first Grace Hopper Celebration was 1994, and had been held for the last 20 consecutive years. Long before DEI.
But when the powers that be are intent to kill off "DEI", and their definition includes anything related to women, this is what happens. Too many business cowards don't want to have problems with their merger, acquisition, IPO, FCC license, etc for supporting celebrating a great American like this, just because she was a woman.
There was definitely gender-based affirmative action benefitting women in 1994 - the term DEI is newer than that (as far as I'm aware), but the concept is definitely not.
According to the Wikipedia article on the event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper_Celebration_of_Wo...), "In 1994, Anita Borg and Telle Whitney founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. With the initial idea of creating a conference by and for women computer scientists, Borg and Whitney met over dinner, with a blank sheet of paper, having no idea how to start a conference, and started to plan out their vision. The first Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing was held in Washington, D.C., in June 1994, and brought together 500 technical women.".
Having a specific conference for women in computing is definitely a DEI concern; from the very beginning, the entire point of having a formal celebration of Grace Hopper was to be a locus for this female-specific conference. Grace Hopper's importance to this conference is that she was a woman, not that she invented FLOW-MATIC.
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It’s not really that simple. Read some of the accounts of the conference from recent years. The conference was falling apart even when companies were sponsoring it. I don’t know about last year’s conference but before that there were a lot of bad experiences and reports that it was turning into more of a job fair than tech conference, but even that wasn’t going well.
It was also getting very expensive. When a conference has a long list of sponsors and tickets also start at $600 minimum, it’s hard to keep that going in a year like this when everyone is dealing with large token spend budgets.
They likely could have survived with a right-sized event but they aimed higher than their budget allowed and hoped the money would appear at the last minute. It did not.
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Isn't the problem here the Anita Borg foundation and not Grace Hopper?
> But when the powers that be are intent to kill off "DEI", and their definition includes anything related to women, this is what happens.
It's the other way around -- they want to do away with anything to do with women, and they used this DEI boogeyman to get everyone scared enough to go along with it.
[flagged]
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> Long before DEI.
This is simply not accurate. It is profoundly inaccurate
DEI didn’t implode. It stopped being a valuable marketing exercise for most companies as it wasn’t trending on social media any more.
It became a liability - corporates were legally threatened
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While cynical, there is a lot of truth to your statement. I wish the activist type would realize that they are actually being used, but it appears there isn't much chance they will ever listen to the old dogs in this game.
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> seems like that didn’t help on funding and sponsors
Do we know any sponsors who pulled out? Even if that was the case, pulling the plug like this at t minus two weeks speaks to problems internally.
From what was reported there was a broad reduction of interest from sponsors. Speculation, but the late cancellation very much sounds like there was an effort to find a main sponsor to make up the gap but no corporate was willing to step up and just be the primary sponsor to fund what was needed.
Corporate lawyers now broadly advise their companies against putting any money towards demographic-specific initiatives due to the risks of being sued for discrimination.
Buying a booth at an event would probably be seen as fine but I can only imagine pitches to be a title sponsor were met with “don’t touch this” advice from corporate lawyers.
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It doesn’t say anyone pulled out at the last minute.
I think we’re trying to put on a very big conference and hoping that big sponsors would come through at the last minute to make the numbers work.
They’ve had some problems in the recent years. It even made NPR headlines for cops having to show up. Everyone who hasn’t heard of the conference until now is assuming the sponsors are entirely to blame but the conference was not doing well for a couple years.
yeah, feels like they were hoping something would come through until it didn't
Most US companies. The rest of the world happily doesn't care - and increasingly doesn't do so solely to avoid looking like United Statesmen.
>The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this
Oh but they were about this. This is the common trend of people thinking that "the good ones" are implicitly exempted from their general and sweeping attacks on $THING. C.f. the hardline anti-immigration voter who thinks that the guy who mows their lawn obviously won't be included in the crackdowns. If you attack the whole concept of DEI (as many did – not necessarily you), then you are in fact attacking events celebrating the achievements of women in fields where they're poorly represented.
>C.f. the hardline anti-immigration voter who thinks that the guy who mows their lawn obviously won't be included in the crackdowns.
huh, that's pretty bizarre, at least here in Australia (where in recent years immigration has exploded to 2x ~ 3x that of the USA), all the anti-immigration voters are sincerely hoping the guy who mows their lawn grew up across town where his wife's sister now lives.
the crackdowns are for the economic migrants just taking a lifestyle arbitrage
ultimately, immigration into large developed nations is an act of altruism, which, like most things in life, cannot scale indefinitely (much to the chagrin of business owners, women, arts students, etc.) - which is not nice, but is true.
A hardline anti-immigration voter is probably less likely to employ a likely-illegal-immigrant guy to mow their lawn than someone who is pro-immigration.
Similarly, someone who has actually attended the Grace Hopper conference is more likely to be pro-DEI than someone who has never attended and doesn't care about it happening.
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> The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this, and thus it would appear this may be collateral damage.
This is not the case at all. There have been ample people complaining about this stuff for years. While there are some people who are upset at various policies for other reasons there really is a battery of people who just genuinely don't want to see minority representation in the workplace. Oftentimes these people dress up their true complaints in softer ones but you really can see people like Chris Rufo pushing for a world where minorities are not in positions of power or authority.
I have personally observed people at my workplace (Google) complaining about any funded attendance at Grace Hopper as discrimination against men.
> Since DEI imploded most companies won’t touch anything with a 100 ft pole that looks like it might go anywhere near that, and seems like that didn’t help on funding and sponsors.
That GHC has had a lot of problems in the past several years. The ticket prices were getting excessive and the conference itself was wandering off course.
Even the current website looks like something that would be hard to justify under most conference travel budget requests: It’s hard to find the actually technical content among the speakers, even though they’re claiming 700+ speakers.
Some of the top selling points are finding employers who are hiring and growing your network. Most companies have tightened up their conference budgets to focus on educational material, not events focus on recruiting people to other companies. Everyone knows conferences will have companies recruiting, but when recruiting is one of the primary selling points it’s more job fair than conference.
The conference has also been problematic on many levels in the past few years. It made news headlines in 2023 for conflict about too many men showing up and arguments about whether or not they were really transgender. The police have been called. They’ve been flirting with political ideologies like Thiel-associated key speakers trying to make the theme of the event encouraging young women to drop out of college. The operations have been a mess from a lot of the reports.
Everyone in these comments is assuming anti-DEI, but everything I heard about the conference was a growing dumpster fire and cash grab for years. I think they finally collapsed when they tried to grow too big after years of bad experiences for their sponsors combined with companies facing increasing AI spend who weren’t interested in spending thousands of dollars to send employees to a conference where recruiting to other jobs was one of the main selling points.
> This always seemed like a good event and only ever heard positive things about it.
Shocking.
This had nothing to do with DEI.
It has everything to do with something we're not allowed to criticize.
DEI didn’t implode; it’s not an implosion when it’s shot at from the outside by malicious actors intent on destroying something they don’t understand and can only kneejerk react to out of unreasoning fear.
This isn’t collateral, this was the plan, the planners were just too stupid to see the natural consequences of their plan. See also the price of diesel.
It was definitely and constantly imploding. It was just kept alive by a giant amount of taxpayer and corporate money.
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DEI did not implode; it was heavily and viciously assaulted.
The implication here that the DEI movement had done nothing wrong is rather naive… it wasn’t all bad, but there was a lot of bad things happening to answer for.
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You could also say that DEI is easier to defend when human work was more valuable and capital was cheaper.
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As should all things evil be.
Oh my goodness. DEI, what a time it was!
When Jim Whitehurst left Red Hat, he was replaced by Paul Cormier, a complete wokee. Cormier got DEI fever and put in place a big corporate framework, led by a newly crowned VP, complete with staff.
DEI affinity groups were established, by ancestry, sexual orientation, veteran status, physical ability, neurodivergence, etc. The groups got t shirts and air time on company calls. Chatter on internal mailing lists shot upwards, often becoming political firestorms.
CEO Cormier got even crazier and started saying things about maybe not belonging at Red Hat if you didn’t buy into the complete DEI koolaid. The entire corporate leadership was using pronouns in email by then.
I was a member of the military veterans DEI group. I appreciated the t shirts and once got a backpack from a contest. It wasn’t all bad.
Some of it was overreach, and it grated on some people. But there was a glorious counter move in the works.
There was a Jewish guy that didn’t like having DEI thrust upon the company. Assessing his pool of allies, he started some quiet conversations and soon applied for a new DEI subgroup, “Jews and Judeo-Christian values”. The corporate DEI sponsors were caught off guard and approved of the group. I got to go to a DEI conference in Alabama on the company dime, a week long kumbaya fest with nice eats at a snazzy resort. Company funding was good!
A checkpoint on where Red Hat was at the time: the lead spokesperson for the Red Hat Women’s group was a muscular transgender person. That didn’t seem crazy in the context.
As the J&JCV group, we got air time and were able to give voice to our preferred messaging. Our ranks included a gay guy that was drummed out of the LGBT group for his airing of occasional conservative viewpoints. He was as welcome in our community as anyone.
Finally, the DEI leadership took a closer look and decommissioned our J&JCV subgroup. We tried to argue and appeal, and I believe we won the battle of logical arguments, but that was of no consequence. We lost our seat at the table.
It may have seemed bleak, but the winds of change were blowing. CEO Cormier was removed by IBM, after very little time in office.
Organic actions were wearing away at DEI, also. A prominent subgroup leader was taking lengthy ‘mental health breaks’ of week long duration— then boasting about it on mailing lists and encouraging others to do the same! Such things are not sustainable.
As I retired a few years later, DEI was operating at a reasonable level. Minority communities ( notably the excellent and long running Black Red Hatters group ) were bringing appropriate, positive messaging and were demonstrating the true power of diversity. Women’s groups were doing a good job of showcasing women in Tech, etc. I don’t remember anything truly crazy in my last year.
I believe things are going to be fine.
Interesting perspective that doesn't blame the downfall of DEI initiatives, or reluctance to travel to the US: https://www.reddit.com/r/womenintech/comments/1x4kilp/commen...
It sounds like this conference had been going downhill for a few years.
Is it because international registrations were down. I know that I am dodging US travel ATM
I've had the option of a free trip to the US twice in the past year.
I've rejected both due toy sentiment right now.
I'm lucky enough to have received one of Grace' nanosecond wires, when .. as a fresh young squib .. I attended one of her lectures and got one handed to me by the Admiral herself.
She was a huge influence on me - as a white male tech nerd - and I have long had a huge interest in women in tech, from Grace to Margaret Hamilton to Jeri Ellsworth and Anouk Wipprecht and more. Jeri's demonstration of her self-made transistors and work rebuilding a tunneling electron microscope were fascinating and rank among the most entertaining things I've seen in a hackerspace this century. Anouks' mad fashiontech excursions are positively exciting. There are many other women technologists who deserve our interest.
So its pretty unfortunate that GCH won't happen this year. I hope there are budding young squibs out there who won't see this as de-motivating with regards to their entry into the technology worlds.
Ugh. A bunch of our students already booked travel and rooms. What a horrible situation all around.
What's stopping those students from holding an impromptu memorial?
Most students are probably on trips paid for by others. Many of those groups would probably not be keen to fund an itinerary-free trip to Irvine California for a few days. Even if the students were purported to want to impromptu organize.
Nothing, but the Grace Hopper Celebration wasn't primarily about memorializing Grace Hopper.
Organizing
were there any hints that this might happen at all? so abrupt
They were advertising tickets three days before they announced everything was cancelled: https://archive.ph/Uimqj
> What happens to my in-person or virtual registration fee?
> Information regarding GHC registration and other financial matters will be communicated to you promptly once we obtain a clearer understanding of AnitaB.org ’s financial condition.
Incredible.
We faculty learned about it this evening. :(
I wonder if people are confused about their repositioning.
An AnitaB.org press release dated April 24, 2025, stated its mission as:
> “to get women in tech skilled, hired, promoted, paid, and funded so that they can thrive, lead, and drive innovation for a more equitable and sustainable future.”
The current mission page instead says:
> “to get our community in tech skilled, hired, promoted, paid, and funded, so they can thrive, lead, and drive innovation for a more impartial and sustainable future.”
It's really hard to tell from their current mission statement who "our community" is.
Since DEI became a curse word, you cannot say you do anything for women anymore. I think it's pretty clear who the community still is, but with snowflakes running the government, wording suffers.
I so hate that trying to help historically disadvantaged groups some extra help is considered bad. Like I get not making a group extra powered, but to help women in tech or research into Black prenatal care just seems absurd.
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“Snowflake” used to be a pejorative to describe the political left…
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Submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50070918
…you’re calling dupe on your own submission?
I submitted it, then did a search for the domain. Noticed that there was discussion on a previous submission, thought that was worth pointing out. ChrisArchitect is pretty good at this, but sometimes I do it myself.
I forgot to do a search first.
Is there something wrong with that?
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of course he does. why not?
this is a new low. also needs a (year) /s
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That other thread is interesting as it raises issues about how the organization is managed money-wise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082093
You don't want to run afoul of Agent Orange by celebrating a woman so close to his coronation
No, please don't make that a thing. They're a great band. They don't deserve that association. :D
I have bad news for you
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Because the actual association is much better?
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for people outside US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
Grace Brewster Hopper (née Murray; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral.[1] She was a pioneer of computer programming. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and used this theory to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language, which was a major influence on COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. She was also one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer. She is credited with writing the first computer manual, "A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator", and is often credited with creating the first compiler.
didn't find anything controversial about her in wikipedia
She was the real deal, just massively overhyped for being a woman.
Here is an earlier programming language (never implemented) that was machine independent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl
I believe they posted "often credited with creating the first compiler", which is still true in this case. Interesting choice of a counter-example for a few reasons, though.
The conference was something else. It was a mix of recruiting, networking, and speakers. It had become really expensive and had some problems in recent years.
I think she’s also well known outside the US, at least if you studied cs
Some of the best hires I ever made came through GHC - truly a sad day.
What does discrimination against men look like and what are the impacts on men when programs try to manage structural misogyny but end up w something else? I feel like a lot of men feel they are being discriminated against (even young boys in 1st and second grade say they girls get preferential treatment even when it’s clear they are the ones being disruptive), so my question is…where is this feeling coming from? (I’m not a man so I dont get it)
Why it may have lacked the funding to continue operations:
"Last year, Women Who Code, a nonprofit that got its start in California, closed because of a lack of funding. AnitaB.org, which brings together women in tech at its annual Grace Hopper Celebration, cut its workforce in 2024 and pointed to a downturn in corporate DEI investments." - "Why Big Tech is pulling back [from DEI efforts]" [2025] (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-02-15/google-and...)
"I've seen companies who have rebranded their diversity, equity, inclusion as colleague engagement, as listening and empowerment, or and whatever else, I've seen many different iterations, and I think a lot of organizations... [want] to get to a place where they can hide their activity..." ... "Those organizations want to continue doing the work, but they no longer want attention for that work. And so to try to, like, hide it in some ways, and we're in a very unprecedented time right now, nothing is normal right now." ... "Well, basically, corporations interpreted the ADA to say, like, I don't have to offer any... And then you have this three executive orders around DEI, and companies are falling over themselves to comply in advance without any legal mandate for compliance." ... "I just saw a New York Times article that was published a list of a hundred and ninety-nine words that the Trump administration is targeting, words like diversity and inclusion, but also things like bias, stereotypes, underrepresented, underserved, and many more words. They're flagging these words, they're removing them from websites, they're investigating, delaying, denying grants and funding." - Bo Young Lee, President of Research & Advisory for AnitaB.org [2025] (https://voices.berkeley.edu/podcast/dei-not-doa-part-1 | locally AI extracted transcript: https://pastebin.ca/5Mmy5Q6deu)
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What scares me for the future of my children is that people cheer or blend in, hide, give up. All this repression is helped from multitude of directions, actively or passively, but helped. And the intentional confrontation, seeking it, is increasingly the norm while standing up for it, the protective confrontation is disappearing into the shades, under the grass, not to be seen, go dormant or in some instances, die. This will not end well.
For as much COBOL as my (former) coworkers use every day, they should bankroll her day.
I have to admit, I suspected the Secretary of War cancelled the funding
Who does AnitaB.org actually support or advocate for?
Their "Our Mission" page refers only to the perfectly vague "our community", never once describing what that is. Nor does their landing page. Their "Our History" page says that the organisation started out to support women in the tech industry, but then describes several name changes, eventually dropping all use of the words "woman" or "women" and switching to the user of "individuals" without explanation or elaboration. It reads like a perfectly choreographed PR "product" designed to maximise deniability of... something. But what?
Your comment is a rhetorical question.
No.
Grace Hopper may not be a casualty of the DEI backlash alone. It may also be a casualty of a hiring market that no longer needs large-scale recruiting events.
I was there a few years back and it was a total mess. Over run and recruiters being assaulted by students throwing resumes. Completely mismanaged.
brick by brick !! this is how we go back !!
I think we can safely assume that all the major sponsors from 2025 pulled out. Any one of them could have carried the whole thing.
https://codewithkate.squarespace.com/blog/the-complete-grace...
Tech Giants & Major Players
Amazon - Booth 751
Google - Booth 1246
Meta - Booth 1010
Nvidia - Booth 1039
Disney - Booth 946
Snap - Booth 447
Roblox - Booth 1209
PlayStation - Booth 433
Nintendo - Booth 429
Finance & Trading Firms
Goldman Sachs - (Location TBD)
Morgan Stanley - Booth 633
Jane Street - Booth 618
Citadel - Booth 62
Two Sigma - Booth 1046
DE Shaw - Booth 410
IMC - Booth 1051
Walleye Capital - Booth 1052
Apollo Global Management - Booth 647
Five Rings - Booth 310
Cboe - Booth 952
Banking & Financial Services Bank of America - Booth 439
Capital One - Booth 831
Bloomberg - Booth 824
Navy Federal - Booth 426
USAA - Booth 614
Vanguard - Booth 819
Insurance & Financial Tech Prudential - Booth 526
CHUBB - Booth 344
Voya Financial - Booth 1226
NEXT Insurance - Booth 1227
Manulife - Booth 1122
Tech & Software Companies Intuit - Booth 422
PayPal - Booth 514
Cloudflare - Booth 533
Wayfair - Booth 342
Xero - Booth 343
Adyen - Booth 605
WEX - Booth 1014
Chewy - Booth 1114
Infoblox - Booth 852
InterSystems - Booth 518
Red Hat - Booth 919
DTCC - Booth 418
Consulting & Professional Services EY - Booth 1228
E-commerce & Entertainment Audible - Booth 1251
Automotive & Manufacturing Rivian - Booth 1022
John Deere - (Location TBD)
Crown Equipment Corporation - Booth 1210
Automotive & Manufacturing Rivian - Booth 1022
John Deere - (Location TBD)
Crown Equipment Corporation - Booth 1210
Real Estate & Corporate Services CBRE - Booth 341
Lumen - Booth 345
Retail & Food Services McDonald's - Booth 339
Healthcare & Medical Technology Tandem Diabetes Care - Booth 313
Northwestern Medicine - Booth 1214
Mortgage & Real Estate Tech Rocket - Booth 1211
So they sponsored last year, now you are asking them to pay 50x more?
And if thay paid the whole thing this year, and pulled out next year, th÷pe PR would be 50x worse. Single company cancelled this event in 2027!
Seems like smart move to get out fast!
You clearly do not work in Tech. Grace Hopper has been around for decades, and companies have understood how important it is for furthering their industries.
This is absolutely the US Gov to blame for its DEI attacks and threats.
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The first thing I think about when I hear GHC is the gaslighting. For years I was prodded about that I should go. Men are absolutely welcome. Everyone is welcome, etc.
I never felt that I was actually welcome. And I don't have to be. It's not for me, and it doesn't have to be. I answered women inviting me that no, that wasn't made for me, have fun though.
Then mass layoffs happened, and men who lost their jobs, or looking for their first job, went.
Suddenly everything flipped. Keynote was basically "what the fuck are all you men doing here, taking the space of women?".
Oh, the gaslighting. Glad I never went.
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There are no isolated phenomena. There are no accidents. It apples to everything. Times are changing. Priorities are changing. The party is coming to an end. People are getting real. It's like the world suddenly progressed past it's childhood or waking from a musical dream.
The courtesy smiles, the pretentive presentations, the sale talk, the polite social customs, the diplomacy, the power due to knowledge, weaponry, currency fixations, - all will face the concrete realities. Water recedes exposing the naked, boisterous economies. The zero-carbon evangelists run to Russia for diesel and to China for minerals or they get extinct, unable to adapt and sitting on their presumptive glory.