Sad to see this canceled and especially at the last minute.
Since DEI imploded most companies won’t touch anything with a 100 ft pole that looks like it might go anywhere near that, and seems like that didn’t help on funding and sponsors.
This always seemed like a good event and only ever heard positive things about it. The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this, and thus it would appear this may be collateral damage.
From what was reported there was a broad reduction of interest from sponsors. Speculation, but the late cancellation very much sounds like there was an effort to find a main sponsor to make up the gap but no corporate was willing to step up and just be the primary sponsor to fund what was needed.
Corporate lawyers now broadly advise their companies against putting any money towards demographic-specific initiatives due to the risks of being sued for discrimination.
Buying a booth at an event would probably be seen as fine but I can only imagine pitches to be a title sponsor were met with “don’t touch this” advice from corporate lawyers.
Also the risk of attracting an arbitrary backlash from the current US government.
It's a shame that events like this are affected, but I can't help but be glad that this ended all the "let's add a linter that bans a growing list of doubleplusunequitable words" or "we're not hiring men this quarter, need to meet our diversity goals".
They were advertising tickets three days before they announced everything was cancelled: https://archive.ph/Uimqj
> What happens to my in-person or virtual registration fee?
> Information regarding GHC registration and other financial matters will be communicated to you promptly once we obtain a clearer understanding of AnitaB.org ’s financial condition.
Why it may have lacked the funding to continue operations:
"Last year, Women Who Code, a nonprofit that got its start in California, closed because of a lack of funding. AnitaB.org, which brings together women in tech at its annual Grace Hopper Celebration, cut its workforce in 2024 and pointed to a downturn in corporate DEI investments." - "Why Big Tech is pulling back [from DEI efforts]" [2025] (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-02-15/google-and...)
"I've seen companies who have rebranded their diversity, equity, inclusion as colleague engagement, as listening and empowerment, or and whatever else, I've seen many different iterations, and I think a lot of organizations... [want] to get to a place where they can hide their activity..." ... "Those organizations want to continue doing the work, but they no longer want attention for that work. And so to try to, like, hide it in some ways, and we're in a very unprecedented time right now, nothing is normal right now." ... "Well, basically, corporations interpreted the ADA to say, like, I don't have to offer any... And then you have this three executive orders around DEI, and companies are falling over themselves to comply in advance without any legal mandate for compliance." ... "I just saw a New York Times article that was published a list of a hundred and ninety-nine words that the Trump administration is targeting, words like diversity and inclusion, but also things like bias, stereotypes, underrepresented, underserved, and many more words. They're flagging these words, they're removing them from websites, they're investigating, delaying, denying grants and funding." - Bo Young Lee, President of Research & Advisory for AnitaB.org [2025] (https://voices.berkeley.edu/podcast/dei-not-doa-part-1 | locally AI extracted transcript: https://pastebin.ca/5Mmy5Q6deu)
this triggers my afraid and helpless cynicism so hard, as in
"the movement of the fuhrer having their struggle trickle down, getting those sosherlests what they deserve.
and womben, beautiful womben, will have many childrens now."
and the dissemination of this ubermensch and untermensch ideology, better human and subhuman, the dissemination of this ideology is boosted by AI owned by key influencers, abusing freedom of speech as freedom to slander, slur and lie.
the Mistry of truth came a little after 1984 but here we are: a list of "bad words"
I wonder if people are confused about their repositioning.
An AnitaB.org press release dated April 24, 2025, stated its mission as:
> “to get women in tech skilled, hired, promoted, paid, and funded so that they can thrive, lead, and drive innovation for a more equitable and sustainable future.”
The current mission page instead says:
> “to get our community in tech skilled, hired, promoted, paid, and funded, so they can thrive, lead, and drive innovation for a more impartial and sustainable future.”
It's really hard to tell from their current mission statement who "our community" is.
Since DEI became a curse word, you cannot say you do anything for women anymore. I think it's pretty clear who the community still is, but with snowflakes running the government, wording suffers.
I so hate that trying to help historically disadvantaged groups some extra help is considered bad. Like I get not making a group extra powered, but to help women in tech or research into Black prenatal care just seems absurd.
Let's not focus too much on the past problems that a group of people had, but let's make sure that the situation is improved for that group right now.
Focusing too much on past and try to tip the scale _because_ the past was so bad may lead to bad outcomes today. It may be perceived as a search for grievances and retribution and not the equalization of outcomes that one claims it should seek.
Snowflake has the weirdest provinance. It was used in Fight Club as a metaphor for individual uniqueness, but because the people who thought Tyler Durden was the coolest thing ever identified with his followers. When Tyler said "You are not snowflakes" they took it to be a positive statement. Snowflake got reinterpreted as a metaphor for fragility.
Ironicly many of those who use the term are not snowflakes in one of those senses and are in the other, but the opposite of what they believe to be true.
> “Snowflake” used to be a pejorative to describe the political left
Horseshoe theory [1]. Both the far left and right are thin skinned, constantly engrossed in nonsensical semantic debates and accusing their betters of lacking a sense of humor.
These days, Varoufakis talks about "radical centrists".
(It's possisble he doesn't actually have a sense of humour and what we're seeing is pure schadenfreude over, eg, the unsurprising stuff that's happening to the centre-left in Sweden right now. Which happened to Starmer, and has yet to happen to Burnham
But this is maybe only "empirical"--- your wiki link mentions the vulnerability of centrism to elite takeover, and subsequent alienation from the masses. Nod to your "betters")
I don't think this word has meaning anymore in modern Western politics. We have institutionalists.They aren't that different from the animating essence of Trump 1.0–they want to go back to some good old days. Even though the world has since changed. And the old days weren't that good, they're the reason we're where we are now.
And we have various folks pitching reform. The idiots on the far left and the right agree on the broad structure of reform, namely, nothing thoughtful except getting rid of the other guys. But they aren't the only ones pitching reform.
Sure. All instances of "centrist" in the #Modern portion of that wiki could be replaced by "institutionalist".. but it would call for a careful analysis of how institutionalism dominates reform
I've rejected both due toy sentiment right now.
Since DEI imploded most companies won’t touch anything with a 100 ft pole that looks like it might go anywhere near that, and seems like that didn’t help on funding and sponsors.
This always seemed like a good event and only ever heard positive things about it. The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this, and thus it would appear this may be collateral damage.
Do we know any sponsors who pulled out? Even if that was the case, pulling the plug like this at t minus two weeks speaks to problems internally.
Corporate lawyers now broadly advise their companies against putting any money towards demographic-specific initiatives due to the risks of being sued for discrimination.
Buying a booth at an event would probably be seen as fine but I can only imagine pitches to be a title sponsor were met with “don’t touch this” advice from corporate lawyers.
It's a shame that events like this are affected, but I can't help but be glad that this ended all the "let's add a linter that bans a growing list of doubleplusunequitable words" or "we're not hiring men this quarter, need to meet our diversity goals".
(Please go ahead and tell me that I'm making my first-hand experiences up, for the linter you can see e.g. https://microsoft.github.io/code-with-engineering-playbook/C...)
I suppose you'll leave it up to the reader to determine what it's been replaced with instead. Things like this perhaps? https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/white-house-says-us-amb...
> What happens to my in-person or virtual registration fee?
> Information regarding GHC registration and other financial matters will be communicated to you promptly once we obtain a clearer understanding of AnitaB.org ’s financial condition.
Incredible.
https://codewithkate.squarespace.com/blog/the-complete-grace...
Tech Giants & Major Players
Amazon - Booth 751
Google - Booth 1246
Meta - Booth 1010
Nvidia - Booth 1039
Disney - Booth 946
Snap - Booth 447
Roblox - Booth 1209
PlayStation - Booth 433
Nintendo - Booth 429
Finance & Trading Firms
Goldman Sachs - (Location TBD)
Morgan Stanley - Booth 633
Jane Street - Booth 618
Citadel - Booth 62
Two Sigma - Booth 1046
DE Shaw - Booth 410
IMC - Booth 1051
Walleye Capital - Booth 1052
Apollo Global Management - Booth 647
Five Rings - Booth 310
Cboe - Booth 952
Banking & Financial Services Bank of America - Booth 439
Capital One - Booth 831
Bloomberg - Booth 824
Navy Federal - Booth 426
USAA - Booth 614
Vanguard - Booth 819
Insurance & Financial Tech Prudential - Booth 526
CHUBB - Booth 344
Voya Financial - Booth 1226
NEXT Insurance - Booth 1227
Manulife - Booth 1122
Tech & Software Companies Intuit - Booth 422
PayPal - Booth 514
Cloudflare - Booth 533
Wayfair - Booth 342
Xero - Booth 343
Adyen - Booth 605
WEX - Booth 1014
Chewy - Booth 1114
Infoblox - Booth 852
InterSystems - Booth 518
Red Hat - Booth 919
DTCC - Booth 418
Consulting & Professional Services EY - Booth 1228
E-commerce & Entertainment Audible - Booth 1251
Automotive & Manufacturing Rivian - Booth 1022
John Deere - (Location TBD)
Crown Equipment Corporation - Booth 1210
Automotive & Manufacturing Rivian - Booth 1022
John Deere - (Location TBD)
Crown Equipment Corporation - Booth 1210
Real Estate & Corporate Services CBRE - Booth 341
Lumen - Booth 345
Retail & Food Services McDonald's - Booth 339
Healthcare & Medical Technology Tandem Diabetes Care - Booth 313
Northwestern Medicine - Booth 1214
Mortgage & Real Estate Tech Rocket - Booth 1211
And if thay paid the whole thing this year, and pulled out next year, th÷pe PR would be 50x worse. Single company cancelled this event in 2027!
Seems like smart move to get out fast!
"Last year, Women Who Code, a nonprofit that got its start in California, closed because of a lack of funding. AnitaB.org, which brings together women in tech at its annual Grace Hopper Celebration, cut its workforce in 2024 and pointed to a downturn in corporate DEI investments." - "Why Big Tech is pulling back [from DEI efforts]" [2025] (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-02-15/google-and...)
"I've seen companies who have rebranded their diversity, equity, inclusion as colleague engagement, as listening and empowerment, or and whatever else, I've seen many different iterations, and I think a lot of organizations... [want] to get to a place where they can hide their activity..." ... "Those organizations want to continue doing the work, but they no longer want attention for that work. And so to try to, like, hide it in some ways, and we're in a very unprecedented time right now, nothing is normal right now." ... "Well, basically, corporations interpreted the ADA to say, like, I don't have to offer any... And then you have this three executive orders around DEI, and companies are falling over themselves to comply in advance without any legal mandate for compliance." ... "I just saw a New York Times article that was published a list of a hundred and ninety-nine words that the Trump administration is targeting, words like diversity and inclusion, but also things like bias, stereotypes, underrepresented, underserved, and many more words. They're flagging these words, they're removing them from websites, they're investigating, delaying, denying grants and funding." - Bo Young Lee, President of Research & Advisory for AnitaB.org [2025] (https://voices.berkeley.edu/podcast/dei-not-doa-part-1 | locally AI extracted transcript: https://pastebin.ca/5Mmy5Q6deu)
"the movement of the fuhrer having their struggle trickle down, getting those sosherlests what they deserve.
and womben, beautiful womben, will have many childrens now."
and the dissemination of this ubermensch and untermensch ideology, better human and subhuman, the dissemination of this ideology is boosted by AI owned by key influencers, abusing freedom of speech as freedom to slander, slur and lie.
the Mistry of truth came a little after 1984 but here we are: a list of "bad words"
God help us all.
An AnitaB.org press release dated April 24, 2025, stated its mission as:
> “to get women in tech skilled, hired, promoted, paid, and funded so that they can thrive, lead, and drive innovation for a more equitable and sustainable future.”
The current mission page instead says:
> “to get our community in tech skilled, hired, promoted, paid, and funded, so they can thrive, lead, and drive innovation for a more impartial and sustainable future.”
It's really hard to tell from their current mission statement who "our community" is.
Let's not focus too much on the past problems that a group of people had, but let's make sure that the situation is improved for that group right now.
Focusing too much on past and try to tip the scale _because_ the past was so bad may lead to bad outcomes today. It may be perceived as a search for grievances and retribution and not the equalization of outcomes that one claims it should seek.
They just don't like it when it's other people
Boy oh boy let me tell you about some stuff going on in sports in the latest years...
Ironicly many of those who use the term are not snowflakes in one of those senses and are in the other, but the opposite of what they believe to be true.
Horseshoe theory [1]. Both the far left and right are thin skinned, constantly engrossed in nonsensical semantic debates and accusing their betters of lacking a sense of humor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
These days, Varoufakis talks about "radical centrists".
(It's possisble he doesn't actually have a sense of humour and what we're seeing is pure schadenfreude over, eg, the unsurprising stuff that's happening to the centre-left in Sweden right now. Which happened to Starmer, and has yet to happen to Burnham
But this is maybe only "empirical"--- your wiki link mentions the vulnerability of centrism to elite takeover, and subsequent alienation from the masses. Nod to your "betters")
I don't think this word has meaning anymore in modern Western politics. We have institutionalists.They aren't that different from the animating essence of Trump 1.0–they want to go back to some good old days. Even though the world has since changed. And the old days weren't that good, they're the reason we're where we are now.
And we have various folks pitching reform. The idiots on the far left and the right agree on the broad structure of reform, namely, nothing thoughtful except getting rid of the other guys. But they aren't the only ones pitching reform.
Why? Status quo is the default in any state.