alt Hacker NewsFor 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.
Replies
peterfirefly • today at 9:50 AM
Isn't the problem here the Anita Borg foundation and not Grace Hopper?
monideas • today at 10:26 AM
> Long before DEI.
This is simply not accurate. It is profoundly inaccurate
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.