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October 13, 2026
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), scheduled for late October in Anaheim, California, has been canceled.
Hosted by AnitaB.org, GHC is recognized as the largest gathering of women and non-binary technologists. Organizers canceled the event two weeks before it was set to begin, citing a funding shortfall after registrations and sponsorship commitments fell below expectations.
The cancellation has left thousands of attendees, speakers, and corporate partners scrambling to cancel travel plans.
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The Origins of the Conference
Anita Borg and Telle Whitney founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in 1994. They sat down together, with no idea of how to run a conference, but determined to carve out space for women in tech to connect. The conference was named after Grace Hopper, a US Navy rear admiral, mathematician, and computer pioneer. Hopper created the first compiler, a program that translated written text into computer code. She also helped develop FLOW-MATIC, which heavily influenced COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), an early high-level programming language still used today. Hopper was one of the first programmers to work on the Harvard Mark I computer during World War II and wrote its first operation manual.
The first conference was held in Washington, D.C., in 1994, and successfully brought together roughly 500 technical women. Since then, the organization has hosted more than a dozen conferences in the last three decades. In 2010, the conference sold out, attracting 2,147 attendees from 29 countries. Since then, the GHC has been held in convention centers to accommodate its growing size. The GHC includes technical sessions, workshops, career development sessions, a career fair, an awards ceremony, and more. In recent years, AnitaB.org partnered with over 700 companies for a single conference, including everyone from Fortune 500 companies to startups.
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The 2026 Cancellation
The 2026 GHC would have been the biggest one yet. It would have featured over 800 speakers, including a keynote from futurist, entrepreneur, and advocate Sinead Bovell. Tech journalist Kara Swisher was meant to deliver the closing address. Speakers included Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder of Cloudflare, and Michelle Curran, former USAF Thunderbird pilot and author.
But the Spokesman-Review pointed out that the lineup lacked high-profile executives such as Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella and IBM’s then-CEO Ginni Rometty, who headlined previous years.
“This is not a decision we made lightly; we understand it leaves many of our community disappointed,” a public statement on GHC’s website says. “It is a function of not having the funds required to move forward with the Celebration, unlike in years past. Unlike past events, this year, both individual registrations and sponsorship commitments came in significantly below our expectations and, ultimately, below the level needed to cover critical operating expenses.”
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What now for Women in Tech?
The abrupt cancellation of the conference has far-reaching effects. Although the tech industry and artificial intelligence have been growing rapidly, women have largely been left out of the boardroom. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports women made up 27.5% of U.S. workers in computer and mathematical occupations in 2025. Stanford’s 2026 AI index also found that gender gaps in AI talent remain deeply entrenched, with no meaningful progress made since 2010.
The cancellation also reflects the larger U.S. pullback on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs for women and people of color. In early 2025, President Donald Trump issued several executive orders targeted at ending DEI. This has since affected programming meant to uplift marginalized communities in all fields.
“Tech companies used to make an effort to support women. … Now we’ve swung completely in the opposite direction. Supporting women in tech has become controversial. It’s become political. It’s become risky,” wrote Sara Mauskopf, CEO and co-founder of Winnie, a child care marketplace.
The GHC was more than a meeting place; it was a catalyst for connection, innovation, and education. Without it, the community faces a real gap.
