What Grace Hopper’s Cancellation Says About Tech Right Now
AnitaB.org Grace Hopper Celebration may be canceled, but OutGeek: Women in Tech events around the world are still going strong, bringing the tech community together, one city at a time.
The email went out on a Monday. The Grace Hopper Celebration, which for thirty-odd years has been the closest thing women in tech have to a homecoming, would not be happening in Anaheim this month after all. The conference was two weeks out. People had flights booked, hotel rooms paid for, visas approved, time off cleared with their managers. Cathy Hackl, who was supposed to emcee, told Forbes she was in shock, that the notice had only just come in.
AnitaB.org was rather blunt about why: registrations and sponsorships came in well below what they needed, below even what it takes to cover basic operating costs. There was no scandal, no controversy. Just not enough money, and not enough people able to come.
I read the announcement twice, and what I felt wasn’t surprise. It was closer to recognition, the way you feel when a friend finally says out loud the thing you’ve both been noticing for a while.
I’ve been running OutGeek Women in Tech events for years, and I can tell you exactly what the last few have felt like. Between 2017 when I ran my first women in tech recruiting event and 2022 when the layoffs began, we’d have eight, ten, sometimes twelve teams in the room, actually hiring. You could walk from table to table and leave with three conversations that might turn into jobs. These days, if four teams show up, I’m relieved. And I’m grateful to every one of them. But I also notice the empty space where the others used to be, and I think about the women who came hoping to find something and went home with one less option than they would have had a few years ago.
It would be easy to read all this as a verdict on women in tech, as if the industry quietly decided the whole effort was optional. I don’t think that’s it. I think tech itself is getting smaller, in a strange and specific way. The money and the hiring have pooled in a few places: AI, and the data centers that feed it. Everywhere else, companies are holding their breath. A lot of them seem to be waiting to find out whether some kid with a laptop is going to vibecode their entire product over a long weekend and post it on GitHub for free. If you aren’t sure your business will exist in two years, you don’t hire. You definitely don’t sponsor a booth, or an event.
So the budgets dried up, and the biggest event went first, because it was the most expensive to keep alive. Will OutGeek be next? I don’t think so. But I’ll admit that the next time a team asks to recruit at our events for free like that one in Toronto five weeks ago, I’m tempted to hang up mid-sentence and let them wonder what happened.
What worries me is that this is exactly the moment these rooms matter most. When jobs are everywhere, you can find one through a website. When they’re scarce, you find them through people: the hiring manager who remembers you from last spring, the woman a few years ahead of you who knows which teams are quietly backfilling. That’s always been what OutGeek is for. Over the years, thousands of women have found jobs through our events, and very few of those started with a job board. They started with someone saying, come talk to my team.
A lot of tech seems to be building toward a frictionless future where nobody has to be in the same room as anybody else. You ask the AI, a bot screens your application, an email tells you no. I get the appeal. People are hard. They’re awkward, they talk too long, they forget your name. But that friction is where the good stuff happens. Nobody ever changed my career through a perfectly optimized interface. It was always a person who leaned over a table and said, you should meet so-and-so (or, you have a burger stain on your shirt). You can’t vibecode that. You have to show up, slightly crooked name tag and all, and talk to strangers until some of them aren’t strangers anymore. For women who’ve spent years being the only one in the meeting, that room isn’t a nice extra. It’s the whole point.
That’s why we keep doing it, four tables or twelve.
If you’re a hiring manager with even one open role, come say hi. If your company used to send money to Anaheim, there are smaller rooms that would put it to very good use. And if you’re one of the women who just cancelled a flight, we’d love to see you. The big room is dark this year. Ours, smaller ones, are still open.
Marina Petrenko
OutGeek Women in Tech