Grace Hopper Celebration

The Grace Hopper Celebration is the world's largest conference for technical women that provides access to sessions covering a wide range of subjects and professional development for all career levels.

Leading researchers present their work, while special sessions focus on the role of women in today’s technology fields, including computer science, information technology, research, and engineering.

WATCH! Learn more about this opportunity on YouTube.

Visit ghc.anitab.org for more information.

It is with a heavy heart that WiCS will not be funding travel to the Grace Hopper Celebration.We have several reasons:

1) The University budget is running a significant deficit. Budgets are being cut across the university, and some university staff and faculty have been (and will continue to be) laid off. Although most WiCS funds come from our industry sponsors, our funds are treated as university operating funds and we have to follow university finance rules and are expected to spend our funds responsibly. In fact, all international travel funded from operating funds now requires university approval, which was not required in the past. The optics of spending tens of thousands of dollars to travel en masse to the States to attend a conference that is not core to the university’s mission of teaching or research would be negative in many ways.

2) Travel to the US is becoming increasingly complicated and unsafe. It would be an immigration nightmare for us to cross the border in a bus of students whose passports are from different countries, saying that we are travelling to a DEI conference. It would raise so many red flags for immigration. (And it is more dangerous to lie about your destination to border officers.) We could limit the trip to Canadian citizens, students who are already in the States for co-op, and non-trans students (for maximal safety, we could limit the trip to U.S. citizens), but imposing these constraints goes against our goals nurturing an inclusive learning environment.

3) We worry that there is a risk that Grace Hopper will not be the same experience as in previous years. Multiple companies have publicly stated that they are defunding all DEI initiatives (it remains to be seen whether GHC sponsorship and attendance is included in this defunding). Multiple universities in the States have publicly stated that they are defunding all DEI initiatives. Grace Hopper (and some participating companies and universities) may feel pressure to open attendance to all genders — which isn’t bad in itself, but in the past this has attracted handfuls of attendees who treat Grace Hopper only as a job fair (not as a mentoring and networking event) and who aggressively dominate the expo booths.

It breaks our hearts to do this. We will wait and see what happens with university finances, with US immigration, and with GHC 2025 before making a decision about attending GHC 2026.

Who is Grace Hopper?

Find out what makes Grace Hopper so iconic and inspirational by listening to her talk on nanoseconds.