The cancellation of this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration, one of the largest gatherings of women in technology, is the latest example of how the retreat from diversity initiatives is reshaping opportunities for women in tech. For three decades, the conference has drawn tens of thousands of attendees looking for jobs, mentors and professional connections, and provided a platform for tech giants eager to prove their commitment to advancing women. But organizers canceled this month’s event — scheduled to begin Oct. 27 in Anaheim, California — after sponsorships and registrations fell short of what was needed to cover costs.

“This isn’t a decision we made lightly,” Brenda Darden Wilkerson, chief executive officer of AnitaB.org, which started Grace Hopper in 1994, said in a statement on Tuesday. “We know this decision affects far more than an event.”This year’s lineup of sponsors had included heavy-hitters such as Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Nvidia Corp. and Bank of America Corp. It wasn’t immediately clear what led to the shortfall, and organizers declined to comment beyond their statement. The announcement prompted an outpouring from women across the industry, who said the annual gathering had played an important role in their careers.

On LinkedIn, women said they felt “heartbroken” and “angry,” with some saying the cancellation reflected broader concerns about how the industry treats women.

“Women in tech have been officially cancelled,” wrote Sara Mauskopf, CEO and co-founder of Winnie, a child-care marketplace. “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.”This year’s keynote was set to feature futurist Sinead Bovell, with tech journalist Kara Swisher delivering the closing address.

Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder and president of Cloudflare Inc., was among the speakers. But the roster lacked the high-profile public-company executives like Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella and International Business Machine Corp.’s then-CEO Ginni Rometty, who headlined the conference in previous years. Past speakers have also included former astronauts, politicians and senior government officials.

The abrupt cancellation of the conference, just two weeks before its kickoff, comes at a critical moment for women in tech. New high-paying jobs in artificial intelligence are disproportionately going to men. And while women hold positions in the C-suites of the biggest tech and artificial-intelligence companies, aside from Lisa Su at Advanced Micro Devices Inc., none run them.

US companies have been scaling back diversity, equity and inclusion programs for women and people of color since early 2025, when President Donald Trump issued a series of executive orders aimed at ending DEI. There are also growing signs that women are losing ground in the highest levels of corporate America: The share of women on the boards of mid-sized and large publicly traded companies dipped below 30% this year for the first time since 2024, according to the group 50/50 Women on Boards.

The Trump administration’s crackdown has made things particularly difficult for organizations focused on women, said Sue Harnett, founder and CEO of Rewriting the Code, a 52,000-member nonprofit dedicated to empowering university students and early-career women in tech. Her group broadened its mission in October 2025 to make it clear it wasn’t exclusively for women, but companies remain wary. Just this week, she said, a corporate backer asked if her group could add a photo of a man to its website.

“It's a precarious moment and it’s discouraging,” Harnett said. “The signal that it sends to the general public, to the companies, most importantly to the women, is really awful.”The trajectory for women in tech hasn’t been encouraging, and many in the industry fear AI could further worsen the divide. Women make up about a quarter of the country’s computer scientists, down from 37% in 1995, according to data from Girls Who Code, which advocates for greater representation for women in the field.

The loss of the Grace Hopper conference also highlights the lack of in-person avenues for women seeking their first jobs or making career moves, leaving them with fewer chances to meet prospective employers, Harnett said. The setback comes as many companies have pulled back on entry-level recruitment while increasingly favoring candidates with master’s degrees or PhDs. In a recent survey of members, 80% said their companies weren’t investing enough time or resources to upskill employees, she said.

The Grace Hopper conference is named in honor of Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who joined the US Naval Reserve during World War II and worked on the pioneering Mark I computer. She later helped develop its successors and contributed to other early advances in computing. Nvidia’s popular H100 and H200 AI chips are also named after Hopper.

Sohini Das, a senior at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, had planned to attend this year’s conference. She said she had won grants from the university to fund her trip and had planned to introduce herself to tech influencers like Morgan Young and Uma Subramanian. She had also hoped to meet representatives from big banks like Bank of America and learn more about how they were incorporating AI into their businesses.

“This was a space for women to be seen in the computer science world,” Das said. “It just feels like we kind of have to go back to fighting for our own space and making sure we’re seen in any shape or form.”Attendance at Grace Hopper had been declining. Roughly 15,000 people attended in 2025, the fewest since 2016, and down from years when attendance routinely topped 20,000, according to data on AnitaB.org’s website. The group said the conference’s cancellation also may have implications for its own future.

For Das, the college student, this year’s conference would have been her fourth. Her first two, she said, had been action-packed, with lavish after-parties sponsored by companies.

But last year, after the Trump administration began threatening to investigate companies for engaging in what it called “illegal” DEI, she said the atmosphere at Grace Hopper changed. There were fewer companies recruiting than usual, said Das, who graduates in the spring. She has interned at LinkedIn, Google and Deloitte and hopes to get a job at a big tech company as soon as school is over.

“It’s really important for women, even especially starting their career, to feel seen,” she said. “I feel like just the removal of this conference is making that really difficult.”