alt Hacker NewsGrace Hopper Celebration Cancelled
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You don't want to run afoul of Agent Orange by celebrating a woman so close to his coronation
Is it because international registrations were down. I know that I am dodging US travel ATM
Ugh. A bunch of our students already booked travel and rooms. What a horrible situation all around.
Some of the best hires I ever made came through GHC - truly a sad day.
For as much COBOL as my (former) coworkers use every day, they should bankroll her day.
Submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50070918
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?
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
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
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.
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)
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.
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.