Comment by cmiles8

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.

DEI didn’t implode. It stopped being a valuable marketing exercise for most companies as it wasn’t trending on social media any more.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

DEI did not implode; it was heavily and viciously assaulted.

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.