The Grace Hopper Celebration has been around since 1994, and for a lot of people, it's the event for women in tech. It's where students land their first internships, where people find mentors and peers who look like them, and where, for a few days, being a woman in a room full of technologists is the norm instead of the exception.
AnitaB.org has cancelled this year's Celebration, which was supposed to take place in Anaheim later this month. Their statement says registrations and sponsorships came in "significantly below" expectations, and the funds needed to put on the event just weren't there.
I was supposed to attend for the first time this year and host a panel on the evolution of nontraditional career paths into tech. I was really looking forward to that conversation.
A little over two years ago, I wrote about how I felt when Women Who Code shut down, and this news brings up a lot of the same feelings.
The sponsorship gap
Conferences like Grace Hopper run on company support, and that support shows up in two ways. The obvious one is sponsorship: booths, recruiting teams, and the dollars that make an event of this scale possible. The less obvious one is registrations. Between tickets, flights, and hotels, attending GHC adds up fast, and for a big chunk of attendees, it's their employer who has historically covered the cost. So when companies stop paying for their teams to attend, low registrations aren't a sign that people don't want to go. They're the same sponsorship gap, just showing up in a different line item.
When that support dries up on both fronts, even the most established event in the space can't happen.
When Women Who Code shut down, it felt like my fears of stagnancy and going backwards were being confirmed. I wish I could say things have turned around since then. Instead:
- Company budgets for DEIB have continued to shrink, and "diversity" has become a word a lot of companies would rather not say out loud.
- Sponsorship dollars for community events have dried up across the board.
- The people these spaces serve are still tired. Being the only woman in the room hasn't gotten less exhausting just because it's gotten less fashionable to talk about.
Women Who Code and Grace Hopper were two of the biggest, most established institutions in this space. If the tech industry, which is by most measures still incredibly well-resourced, isn't investing in them, then smaller grassroots groups are in an even tougher spot.
What's next
One of my personal goals right now is to speak more, and news like this makes that feel more important than ever. If the big stages are disappearing, those of us who have a platform need to keep using it.
But you don't need a stage to make a difference. Look around at your team, your community, your classmates, and find the people who are undervalued and underrepresented. Mentor them, recommend them, amplify their work, and make sure they're heard in the rooms they're in. That kind of support doesn't need a sponsor.
Thanks for reading <3
Top comments (7)
Similar feelings. With energy and tenacity we keep going. ❤️
Really well said, Jess! Heartbreaking to see a historic event like this struggling, and very telling of our current environment. Hopefully the pendulum can swing back someday, but a lot of damage will have already been done.
I was devastated to see this event was cancelled for this year. Lately it's felt like 2 steps forward 3,000 steps back. Also, I feel like I'm not actually seeing anywhere near enough coverage of the fact that GHC isn't happening this year. We need to be more upset, more outraged. We can't just accept this and we can't get overwhelmed by it either or it will be death by a thousand cancelled conferences.
What makes this particularly troubling is that the disappearance of these spaces represents more than the loss of conferences. It can mean the gradual erosion of professional networks, mentorship opportunities, and pathways into an industry where access has never been distributed equally.
I think Kara raises an important concern about the cumulative impact of these cancellations, while Amanda's observation about the damage already being done deserves attention. Even if funding eventually returns, professional communities cannot always be rebuilt as quickly as their budgets were withdrawn.
There's also a structural issue worth examining. When opportunities for underrepresented professionals depend heavily on corporate sponsorship, their continuity becomes vulnerable to changes in corporate priorities. That raises an uncomfortable question: if inclusion is genuinely considered essential to innovation and talent development, why is the infrastructure supporting it so often treated as discretionary?
Your point about employer-funded attendance is especially insightful. Declining registrations can easily be interpreted as declining interest when they may actually reflect declining access. Those are two very different problems, requiring very different responses.
I appreciate your emphasis on individual action, particularly mentorship and advocacy. But I would add that grassroots resilience shouldn't become an excuse for institutional withdrawal. Personal commitment can sustain a community, but lasting opportunity also requires resources, accountability, and investment.
Perhaps the most important measure of an industry's commitment to inclusion isn't what it celebrates when budgets are generous, but what it chooses to preserve when priorities become difficult.
curious how you're scaling the mentorship matchmaking for a fully virtual GHC, are you leaning on profile similarity scores or a manual sign‑up flow? automated pairing usually hashes key attributes to compute a similarity matrix, then runs a greedy assignment to keep latency low
Thanks for Writing <3
good