I wanted more from Grace Hopper, but its cancellation still unsettles me

Twelve years ago I wrote a post called “Grace Hopper sucked lol”. I had gone to the conference in Phoenix expecting to find a community of women like me, and I came away disappointed by a lot of the programming. I still agree with much of what I wrote, but the news that this year’s conference has been cancelled feels pretty unsettling.

I wanted these spaces to offer us more, and now I’m worried about what happens if we lose them altogether. Losing opportunities to meet, learn from, and advocate for one another will make it harder for women to stay and advance in tech, especially when they are still building their careers.

AnitaB.org says registrations and sponsorship commitments fell below what it needed to cover operating expenses. The organization is evaluating its future programming, so this is not an announcement that Grace Hopper is permanently over. GHC India is still scheduled, but the US event is cancelled and what comes next is uncertain. For a gathering that began in 1994, that feels like a significant loss of stability.

I still want women’s technical spaces to expect more of us

One of my frustrations in 2014 was that so much of the content felt introductory or focused on confidence, identity, and navigating the workplace. Those are useful subjects, but I had also come to a computing conference hoping to learn something technically interesting.

I was early in my career, but I had already worked on operating systems and drivers and interned at Facebook. A few friends and I went to a GitHub session expecting something about how Git worked, and instead we got an introduction to using it. The session about building Chromium was much closer to what I had hoped for.

I still see a version of this in women’s initiatives. In trying to make a space accessible, the programming can end up assuming a junior audience or avoiding technical depth, and women further along in their careers are left with relatively little to engage with. There are only so many discussions about speaking up that you want to attend when you were hoping to talk about the actual work.

There should be room for someone learning Git and someone designing a distributed system. Supporting the first person should not mean repeatedly failing to offer much to the second, and I don’t think accessibility requires us to make that tradeoff.

That criticism still matters to me. I don’t want to rewrite my experience into something uniformly wonderful because the conference is in trouble, but I also don’t think its shortcomings made it disposable.

The community mattered even when the programming disappointed me

The first part of my old post describes looking around and seeing women everywhere. I was used to being one of relatively few women in a technical room, and suddenly I was surrounded by thousands of them. I remember how unusual it felt, but I think I understand its value better now.

You can find technical content elsewhere, but it is harder to recreate that experience of being surrounded by women who have chosen the same field. Some are doing work you want to do, some are much further along, and some are trying to figure out the same things you are. You get to see a lot of possible versions of a career in front of you.

GHC had become a place people could orient themselves around. You could plan to meet friends, look for a job, or find someone whose experience made your own feel a little less strange. Even if the conference was not everything you wanted, you knew it existed and that other women would be there.

Seeing that become financially precarious feels untethering in a way I would not have expected when I wrote the first post.

Corporate support feels much less dependable now

The part that worries me most is how easy it seems to have become for businesses to stop supporting this kind of work.

My read is that investing in women’s careers no longer feels as necessary to a company’s public image as it did a few years ago, and withdrawing support no longer carries the same perceived reputational cost. Maybe a veil is lifting on commitments that were always conditional, or maybe businesses are making harder decisions about expenses. Either way, the sponsorship, travel budget, development program, or person responsible for keeping the community running can disappear.

That does not tell us why any particular company did not sponsor GHC. The organizers cited lower registrations as well as sponsorships, and the finances of a large conference deserve scrutiny on their own. I still see its cancellation as a warning about how fragile these institutions become when corporate priorities change.

There is evidence of a broader retreat too. In McKinsey and LeanIn.Org’s 2025 Women in the Workplace study, only about half of participating companies treated women’s advancement as a high priority, and the report describes reductions in some career development and sponsorship programs.

I don’t think everyone involved in those programs was being insincere. People can care deeply about the work while the organization they work for decides it is no longer worth paying for, and the opportunities disappear regardless of how those individuals feel.

The women who need those connections most will struggle to replace them

I am particularly worried about women in the junior and middle parts of their careers. If you already have a network, some credibility, and people who will advocate for you, you have other places to turn. If you are still building those things, losing a gathering like GHC is a much bigger disruption.

The same workplace study found that entry-level women were less likely than men to have a sponsor, and removing opportunities to form those relationships seems like a fairly obvious way to make an existing problem worse.

The leaky pipeline is an abstract phrase for a lot of individual experiences. Someone does not get the assignment that would help her advance, or she cannot find another role after a layoff. Someone spends years trying to work out whether the problem is her ability or the environment, and eventually staying becomes harder to justify.

A conference cannot solve all of that, but it can help someone meet the person who gives her a referral, tells her about a role, or helps her recognize that her experience is not unique. Those interactions can change what happens next, even if their value is difficult to attribute to a sponsorship budget.

I expect the pipeline to get worse if we keep withdrawing support without replacing what it provided. The effects will take longer to show up than the savings, and by then a lot of individual decisions will already have been made.

I don’t know what comes after this

Maybe GHC returns in a smaller form, or smaller communities end up doing some of this work better. I would like to see spaces that offer both serious technical content and the community I was looking for in 2014, but I don’t know who funds that consistently or how we recreate the reach of something people had known about for decades.

I am also uncomfortable with the expectation that women will somehow replace it through more unpaid organizing and mentoring. If companies withdraw funding and the response is that women should volunteer to fill the gap, we have added another responsibility to the people the programs were supposed to support.

When I went to Grace Hopper, I wanted it to be better, and I still do. I had assumed that the institution itself would be there to improve, but that assumption feels much less secure now.