On October 13, two weeks before it was set to take place, AnitaB.org announced that the 2026 Grace Hopper Celebration was canceled.
My immediate reaction: What the heck is happening in our world? And I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one.
Grace Hopper isn’t a small conference that couldn’t find its audience. It’s well-known as one of the largest gatherings of women in tech. AnitaB.org says more than 700 organizations participate each year. They were open about the why behind the cancellation: registrations and sponsorship commitments came in well below expectations, and in the end, below what it would cost to put on the event.
That's a pretty loud sign.
By loud, I mean hard to ignore. It reverberates within you, and your instinct is “oh, this means something.” And then sometimes, because it did grab your attention, you give it more weight than the evidence underneath it can actually support.
Immediately after reading about the cancellation, I came up with several explanations for what it meant: Companies are pulling back from women-focused work. Women aren't interested in these conferences anymore. Big professional conferences have run their course.
And if I’m being particularly self-aware, those explanations jumped the queue for me because they’re things I’m already worried about professionally. And it feels to me like any one of them could be true.
This is familiar territory for me. Swap tech or engineering for business leadership, and you’ll find my employer, Forté. I know what organizations and events built around women can provide. They give women places to look at their careers through a gender lens. They give them a chance to look around a room and see hundreds or thousands of people whose careers make their own ambitions feel more possible.
So yes, the idea that there might be fewer of those places worries me. Especially because it’s not as though the need for them has disappeared. In the same article in which I learned about the Grace Hopper cancellation, it said that in 2025, women made up nearly half (47.1%) of the overall U.S. workforce, but comprised only 27.5% of workers in computer and mathematical occupations.
And this isn’t only about Grace Hopper. We do this with our careers all the time. A sign shows up, it lands on something we’re already worried about, and we’ve decided what it means before we’ve looked at anything else.
But one canceled conference didn’t tell me which of those explanations was right. It didn’t even tell me that any of them were. And deciding what a sign means in the first five minutes doesn’t work much better in our careers.
Maybe “what does this mean?” isn’t the best first question. Maybe it’s “what else would I need to know?”
I started with SWE.
The Society of Women Engineers’ annual conference is next month in Boston, and SWE expects more than 14,000 attendees and 300 employers. Ok, tech and engineering aren’t exactly the same, I get that. But still, this at least, to me, doesn’t sound like women have lost interest in gathering with other women in their respective field.
At least at first glance. Then I went into SWE’s history and found something else: shrinking attendance. SWE reports 21,683 attendees in 2023, 19,114 in 2024, and 13,930 last year. That's a drop of roughly 36% in two years.
14,000 people is still a huge conference, but the direction matters. This year’s expected 14,000 is right about where they landed last year, so maybe the drop is leveling off. Or maybe not. One year of roughly flat attendance doesn't tell us that either.
But put the two events side by side and I'm a little less willing to write off Grace Hopper as one organization having a bad year. I'm also not willing to say I know what they mean. And so I kept looking.
One possibility is money. Corporate sponsorships, recruiting dollars, and professional development budgets. Do companies that used to sponsor several big conferences now have to choose between them? Do women who used to attend several events now have the time or budget for one, if that?
Another possibility is that the big conference model itself is changing. Maybe companies are recruiting differently. Maybe women are finding different ways to build their networks and careers. Maybe what people need hasn’t changed, but how they get it has.
And yet another possibility is risk. In the current legal and political environment around DEI, companies are looking much more carefully at programs built around a particular population. And that gets complicated. An event can be open to everyone and still intentionally look at careers, leadership, networking, or skill-building through the experience of women. But is a company as comfortable putting its name and money behind that as it once was?
I don’t know. And that's the point. Money, changing preferences, and increased risk could all produce some of the same signs from the outside. They could also all be happening at the same time.
Grace Hopper got my attention because it was loud. And maybe that’s exactly what loud signs are good for. They get our attention. They make us stop and look at something we might not have been looking at closely enough before.
The problem comes when we skip the looking part and decide that we immediately know what the loud sign means. With Grace Hopper, asking what else I’d need to know sent me to SWE, to budgets, to changing conference models, and to the current risk around DEI.
I didn’t get certainty, nor did I find one obvious answer. Let’s be honest, there probably isn’t only one. But some of the explanations I jumped to in the first 30 seconds are a lot harder to defend. “Women just aren’t interested anymore” is tough to argue when 14,000 of them are about to show up in Boston. “One bad year” is harder to believe next to SWE’s numbers. And money looks more plausible than it did, since AnitaB.org pointed to lower sponsorship commitments as one reason for the cancellation. But that still doesn’t tell me why those commitments were lower.
And maybe that’s what makes “what else would I need to know?” such a useful question for our careers, too.
Say your company announces a reorg, and within five minutes you’ve convinced yourself you're losing your job. Whose teams are actually changing? What has your manager said, and what haven’t they said? Is this about cost, a new strategy, or a new leader who wants their own structure?
You might not get certainty there either. But you’ll know a lot more than you did in those first five minutes.
We spend a lot of time looking for certainty. I know I do. But there isn’t always a right answer waiting for us if we just look hard enough.
Sometimes the certainty is knowing what you know. And knowing what you don’t.
