alt Hacker NewsThere 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.
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Why do you find it concerning that a conference would focus on women?
"where is the conference celebrating white men?" -how you sound
Grace Hopper graduated from Yale with a PhD in 1933. In 1952, Professor Bessie Lee Gambrill became the first woman at receive tenure at Yale.
Many women mathematicians in computer science worked in the field because they were denied a university career path because of their gender.
As an example of how late gender equality arrived, Olga Taussky-Todd (Caltech) held only a “research associate” title from 1957 until Caltech made her its first female full professor in 1971.
https://mathematics.caltech.edu/about/prizes-awards/olga-tau...
It is not wrong to celebrate a more enlightened world by highlighting its trailblazers and encouraging others to follow their footsteps in breaking barriers.