Two weeks. That's how much notice the community got.
The Grace Hopper Celebration, slated for October 27–30 in Anaheim, is canceled. AnitaB.org's notice is candid about why: individual registrations and sponsorship commitments both came in well under expectations, and under what it takes to keep the lights on. Flights are booked. Talks are written. Hotel deposits are sitting on credit cards. And thousands of women, many of them students who were counting on GHC for their first real shot at a recruiter's attention, just lost one of the biggest rooms they had.
AnitaB.org's own notice names what's at stake: travel booked, hotels reserved, visas granted, time off approved, teams organized. (If that's you: the notice asks you to cancel flights and hotels directly with your providers, says registrants will hear about registration fees by October 26, and routes questions to GHC@AnitaB.org.)
For a lot of women in this career, "Grace Hopper" was more than a conference. It was a destination. You heard about it from a professor, a manager, the senior engineer who'd been. Getting there was a milestone. Over the years, my own connection to AnitaB.org ran through its local chapters, the smaller rooms where a few dozen women in tech actually got to know each other. When I was just starting out in tech, I taught workshops there on object-oriented programming in Ruby and Python.
That's the duality worth naming. GHC was the name brand, the place everyone knew. But belonging was built year-round in chapters, meetups, Slacks and DMs from mentors. Losing the destination hurts. Whether we keep investing in everything around it is what decides what happens next.
I want to be clear about one thing before going further: this isn't a pile-on. Running a conference at GHC's scale is brutal, and the people who built it gave a generation of women in computing a place to belong. But I've spent a decade building distributed systems and a decade building community, and from both seats I see the same pattern: when the work changes, the architecture evolves.
From monolith to network
GHC has - arguably - been the biggest room for women-in-tech, but it was never the only one. More than 700 companies participate each year, per Forbes. For a lot of companies, "supporting women in tech" quietly collapsed into one line item: sponsor GHC, send recruiters, post the booth photo.
How big is big? AnitaB.org says GHC grew from 630 attendees in 2002 to more than 22,000 in 2018, and last year's Chicago edition drew over 20,000 participants (AnitaB.org marketed it as 30,000+). That's enormous. But it isn't alone at the top. The Society of Women Engineers' WE24, also in Chicago, drew 19,114 people, and SWE bills its own conference as the world's largest for women and allies in engineering and technology. "Largest" depends on who's counting and which lane you're in.
Any engineer knows this pattern. Plenty of great systems start as a monolith, and that's not a mistake: it's how you get something big off the ground. But as the work grows and changes, you break it into services that can scale, evolve and run on their own. That's not a teardown. It's a refactor.
And the change reaches beyond one event. In the full notice, CEO Brenda Darden Wilkerson writes that GHC has been central to AnitaB.org's mission and that the circumstances behind the cancellation have hurt the organization's finances. AnitaB.org is now weighing strategic alternatives and what programming it can offer going forward, with more announcements expected in the coming weeks. When one big event is also the funding model, a shift in that event reshapes the whole organization.
And the timing matters. Women held about 27.5% of U.S. computer and mathematical jobs last year, per Forbes' read of BLS data, and the gap is widest exactly where the industry is heading next.
When budgets tighten, diversity spend treated as marketing is the first thing cut. That's not a GHC problem. That's an us problem.
The AI double bind
Here's why this lands differently in 2026 than it would have in 2016. AI is where the jobs, the money and the leverage are going, and women are getting squeezed from three sides at once.
- Building it. Women made up just 26% of U.S. AI hires in 2025, versus 50% of hires into non-AI roles, per LinkedIn. Across 27 countries, they hold only 13% of C-suite AI leadership roles at AI companies. Stanford's 2026 AI Index, as summarized by Forbes, found no country at gender parity among AI researchers and developers, and no meaningful progress since 2010.
- Being displaced by it. In high-income countries, jobs at the highest risk of generative-AI automation make up 9.6% of women's employment, versus 3.5% of men's, according to the ILO. The study's lead author told World Politics Review that if those jobs vanished, two women would be displaced for every man.
- Using it. A meta-analysis of 18 studies covering more than 140,000 people found women roughly 20% less likely than men to use generative AI, and the gap held even when access was equalized.
Meanwhile, U.S. AI job postings have roughly doubled since 2023, per the same LinkedIn research. The opportunity is growing. Women's share of it doesn't have to stay where it is.
And look at what the research says drives the usage gap: familiarity, confidence, training. Someone to learn alongside. That isn't a recruiting booth. That's a workshop, a sprint, a mentor, a chapter meetup on a Tuesday night. It's exactly what community spaces like PyLadies do, and exactly what disappears when we treat them as optional.
The comments section already knows
Want the ground-level view? Read the r/csMajors thread. The top comment asks whether employers simply aren't hiring, so they aren't paying for booths. The original poster guesses sponsors saw weak ROI as attendance dropped. Others point out it's expensive unless a company or school covers you. One commenter says they stopped registering three years ago because the companies there weren't hiring entry-level anyway. And the original poster was only planning to attend virtually, and is still gutted.
That's not one bad year. That's a market shift:
- Companies freeze entry-level hiring.
- Students see fewer employers and skip registering.
- Fewer attendees, weaker ROI, sponsors pull out.
- Revenue falls below operating costs. Event canceled.
When a community event is mostly a recruiting fair, it rises and falls with the hiring market. A community that exists for its own sake, for learning, mentoring and belonging, keeps going when the booths go dark.
What GHC promised is still worth building
In June, AnitaB.org published a first-timer's guide to GHC 26. Read it now and it lands differently. Its pitch wasn't really the expo hall. It was the feeling of walking into a room full of women who get it. Hearing a speaker name the thing you've felt for years. Leaving with confidence, momentum, and proof that you belong. Realizing you are not navigating this industry alone.
Every word of that is true. And none of it requires a convention center in Anaheim.
AnitaB.org said it best in the cancellation notice itself: GHC has always been about "more than a place or a moment on the calendar." I agree. So let's prove it.
It's worth remembering where GHC came from. Anita Borg and Telle Whitney started it in 1994 in Washington, D.C., with about 500 women in the room, and Borg had already started Systers, an email list for women in computing, back in 1987. As recently as 2002, GHC drew just 630 people. That's grassroots. That's a community before it was a brand. The belonging GHC promised was always built by people, not by sponsorship tiers, and people can build it again: in chapters, in meetups, on Discord, in free online conferences.
Community should be a distributed system
Here's what a resilient version looks like, and it already exists.
When I started PyLadies Chicago, there was no keynote stage and no expo hall. There was a room, some pizza, and people who wanted to write Python together. PyLadies grew the same way everywhere: chapter by chapter, city by city, organizer by organizer. No single chapter is load-bearing. If one goes quiet, the network routes around it.
That's the architecture worth investing in: many small nodes, low cost to join, and leaders who grow out of the community instead of being flown in for it.
Margaret Hamilton kept the mission flying
Just two weeks before GHC went dark, we lost Margaret Hamilton. She died September 30 at 90. At MIT's Instrumentation Lab she led the onboard flight software for the crewed Apollo missions, and she started calling the work "software engineering" so it would be taken as seriously as any other engineering discipline. She was also the first woman programmer on the Apollo project.
During Apollo 11's descent, the guidance computer threw 1202 alarms. It was overloaded. Hamilton's priority-driven software did exactly what it was built to do: it shed the nonessential background work, kept the critical tasks running, and Houston gave the go to land.
That's adapting under pressure, and it's the whole argument of this post. When conditions change mid-mission, you don't abort. You reprioritize. You protect what matters most and keep flying. For women in tech right now, what matters most isn't the expo hall. It's the learning, the mentoring and the belonging, and we can keep those running even when one big room goes dark.
Her daughter Lauren has said Hamilton raised her believing there were no gender barriers to what she could do. That's the inheritance. Let's keep it running.
One room to try next: PyLadiesCon, December 5–7
If GHC was on your calendar, here's one place to start.
PyLadiesCon 2026 is the fourth global PyLadies conference, and it is:
- Free. Not "early-bird discounted." Free.
- Online. No flight, no hotel, no visa. The organizers chose this on purpose to lower barriers for people everywhere.
- Multilingual and multi-timezone. Sessions in English, Español, Português, Deutsch, 日本語 and 中文.
- Hands-on. Tutorials and workshops where you build something, sprints with actual maintainers (first-time contributors welcome), open spaces, panels on Python and careers, and networking.
- Open to everyone. No local chapter? Don't know Python yet? Come anyway.
It's run by volunteers I'd trust with anything: Georgi Ker, Mariatta, Vicky Twomey-Lee, Cristián Maureira-Fredes, Maria José Molina, Abigail Dogbe, Naa Ashiorkor Nortey and many more.
And to be clear: PyLadiesCon is one example, not the answer. Calling any single conference the gathering for women in tech overstates it, and the industry is already moving past that framing. The rooms already exist:
- SWE's WE26: Boston, November 5–7, with 15,000+ attendees expected.
- WiCyS: 2,000+ in person and 1,026 virtual registrants this March, plus 865 scholarships awarded.
- The Tapia Celebration: CMD-IT/ACM's conference for diversity in computing, held in Atlanta this September.
- Women in Data Science (WiDS): born at Stanford, now in an estimated 150+ locations worldwide, with WiDS Munich coming up December 11.
- RLadies+: 200+ chapters in 60+ countries and over 100,000 members.
- Lesbians Who Tech & Allies: its 14th annual LWTSUMMIT lands in New York June 7–9, 2027, with hands-on AI workshops built for every role (not just engineers), a free virtual pass, and scholarships for people between jobs.
None of them has to carry everyone. That's the point.
Reinvest, don't retreat
The GHC budget didn't evaporate. It's sitting in someone's spreadsheet right now. Here's where it can go:
| If you are… | Do this |
|---|---|
| A student or early-career dev who lost GHC | Register for PyLadiesCon, find your local PyLadies chapter, and submit to a regional PyCon. Smaller rooms, better conversations. |
| A company with an unspent GHC line item | Sponsor PyLadiesCon (as of this writing, the sponsor wall is still empty), fund local chapters, and send your recruiters to community events year-round, not once a year. |
| A senior engineer or manager | Volunteer: subtitles, moderation, sprint mentoring. Or simply sponsor one person's first talk. |
| Anyone | Donate. Small, recurring, distributed. Exactly the resilience we're talking about. |
| Looking for more rooms | The community's own picks: WiCyS for security, the SWE conference and your local SWE chapter, and field-specific conferences (PyCon, NeurIPS) where hiring is more targeted. |
IDIC, not a booth
Vulcan philosophy has a phrase for this: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. It was never meant to be one big annual gathering. It's a way of operating, every day, in every combination of people who show up.
Grace Hopper famously said it's easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission. So let's not wait for permission, or for the next big room to be rebuilt. The infrastructure is already here, and PyLadiesCon is less than two months out.
Your move, starting today
Pick one. Do it before Friday.
- Register for PyLadiesCon. Free, December 5–7, from wherever you are.
- Forward this to whoever owns your company's GHC budget. That money is looking for a home right now. Point it at PyLadiesCon sponsorship, a local chapter, or scholarships for the next room.
- Raise your hand to volunteer. Subtitles, moderation, sprint mentoring. An hour of yours could be someone's first open source pull request.
- Find or start a local chapter. Every new node makes the network stronger.
- Message one person who was headed to Anaheim. Tell them there's still a room for them.
The reality is real: one of our biggest rooms just went dark, and the numbers in AI are stark. But I've watched this community build something out of one room and a few pizzas more than once. We know how to do this. Let's go do it.
See you December 5–7.
Until next time: live long, Python & prosper. 🖖
Sources: AnitaB.org GHC notice · Forbes, Sandy Carter (Oct 13, 2026) · PyLadiesCon 2026 · Stanford AI Index 2026
Size and history: AnitaB.org history · CSULB on GHC 25 · SWE attendance · Wikipedia: Anita Borg · WiCyS 2026 · RLadies+ FAQ
Women in AI: LinkedIn AI hiring data via HR Dive · ILO–NASK GenAI exposure index (UN News) · HBS: Women are avoiding AI · CRA Taulbee 2025
Also cited: AnitaB.org cancellation notice (full text) · AnitaB.org GHC 26 first-timer's guide · r/csMajors thread · World Politics Review on ILO study · LinkedIn AI job postings via Fox · SWE WE26 · Tapia 2026 · WiDS Munich / WiDS Worldwide · LWTSUMMIT 2027 · LWT 2026 agenda
Margaret Hamilton: MIT News obituary (Oct 7, 2026)