Grace Hopper's Cancellation Is a Warning About Who Gets to Build AI

AnitaB.org canceled the 2026 Grace Hopper Celebration after registrations and sponsorships fell short of what it needed to cover costs. The news comes two months after LinkedIn reported that women made up 26% of US hires into AI jobs in 2025, compared with 50% of non-AI hires. Several groups that helped women find tech jobs have lost corporate funding over the past two years.

Attendees who had booked travel to Anaheim learned this week that the trip was off. AnitaB.org canceled the 2026 Grace Hopper Celebration about two weeks before it was set to open, citing a shortfall in registrations and sponsorships. The conference, scheduled for Oct. 27 to 30, has run since 1994, draws more than 700 companies a year and had booked more than 800 speakers, Yahoo News reported. Organizers told attendees to cancel their own travel and hotel plans.

In a statement, AnitaB.org President and CEO Brenda Darden Wilkerson said both registrations and sponsorship commitments came in well below expectations and below what the nonprofit needed to cover operating costs. She put the decision down to "not having the funds required to move forward with the Celebration." The organization said the cancellation has hurt its finances and that it is reviewing what programming it can offer going forward.

The timing is hard to separate from what is happening in the job market. Grace Hopper has long served as a recruiting pipeline for women in tech. It ran out of money in the same year LinkedIn found that women were landing about a quarter of new AI jobs, the fastest-growing and best-paid part of the industry.

A hiring pipeline loses its funding

For a lot of attendees, Grace Hopper was where a career started. Students came looking for internships, and the career expo put them in front of recruiters from companies whose past sponsors include Capital One, CVS Health, Disney, Goldman Sachs, Google, Intuit and Morgan Stanley, JKN reported. In 2023 the event drew roughly 30,000 people, and recruiter time was scarce enough that men lined up for interviews at the career fair, NPR reported.

Events like that depend on corporate budgets, and those budgets have been shrinking for years. Women Who Code shut down in 2024. Wonder Women Tech lost booth sponsors and renamed its conference Wonder Tech Fest, the Washington Post reported. The share of companies with formal mentorship programs for women fell from 48% in 2022 to 37% in 2024, according to LeanIn.Org and McKinsey research reported by Bloomberg.

Attendance and sponsorship are also more connected than they look. As one developer noted on DEV Community, employers have typically paid for staff to attend Grace Hopper. When those travel and training budgets disappear, registrations fall with them.

Women are 26% of AI hires

The conference's troubles mirror a gap in AI hiring. Women made up 26% of US hires into jobs requiring AI skills in 2025, compared with 50% of hires into other roles, according to LinkedIn research published in August. AI jobs also pay more. Postings on LinkedIn have doubled since 2023, and the typical AI listing advertises about $177,000 a year, versus about $80,000 for other jobs, CBS News reported.

The higher the role, the wider the gap. Across 27 countries, women hold 13% of leadership roles at AI companies, compared with 20% of the same roles across tech overall. They made up 20% of Head of AI hires, 26% of Director of AI hires and 18% of Member of Technical Staff hires, Fox 5 reported.

That last title says the most about who builds the technology. Member of Technical Staff is what many AI labs call their engineers and researchers, and women's share of those roles fell from 23% in 2021 to 19% in May 2026, according to an analysis of LinkedIn data by Women AI Builders and WomenTech Network.

LinkedIn spokesperson Sarah Steinberg told CBS News that women are caught on both sides: more likely to see their jobs disrupted by AI and less likely to share in the pay premium and new roles it creates. "That's what keeps me up at night," she said.

More exposure, fewer ways in

Steinberg's concern shows up in the research. Women make up 86% of the 6.1 million US workers in clerical and administrative jobs that are both exposed to AI and hard to move out of, according to Brookings. McKinsey researchers estimate that by 2030, women will be 1.5 times as likely as men to need to change jobs because of AI, the Boston Globe reported.

The usual ways into the industry are narrowing at the same time. In a survey by the women's leadership network Chief, 69% of women leaders said their companies had cut entry-level and early-career hiring as AI takes on that work, Fortune reported. Fewer junior roles now means fewer women in line for senior AI jobs later.

Women get less support for using AI at work

A common explanation for the gap is that women simply use AI less. The consumer data doesn't bear that out. In a Pew Research Center survey from February 2026, 47% of US women and 50% of US men said they had used an AI chatbot.

The gap is wider at work, and it tracks how managers treat people. In a March 2026 Lean In survey, 27% of women and 33% of men said they used AI daily on the job. Thirty-seven percent of men said a manager had encouraged them to use AI, compared with 30% of women. Among those using it, 23% of men and 18% of women had been praised for it, according to WomenTech Network's summary of the Pew and Lean In data.

Using AI can also cost women credibility. In a study of more than 1,000 engineers published in Harvard Business Review, reviewers rated women who used AI 13% less competent, compared with 6% for men. Male engineers who didn't use AI themselves rated women who did 26% less competent. Hilary DeCesare, CEO of The reLaunch Company, told LeadDev that because women get less encouragement and less credit, they never build the same track record with AI that men do.

The gap can be closed. A German study by Initiative D21 and the Institute for Employment Research found that at employers offering AI training, 20% of women and 21% of men used AI intensively, according to the EU Digital Skills and Jobs Platform.

Record funding, mostly in two companies

Venture funding looks like an exception until the numbers are broken down. Startups with at least one female founder raised a record $73.6 billion in 2025, according to PitchBook data reported by Fortune. About two-thirds went to AI companies, and nearly half of that AI money went to Anthropic and Scale AI. All-female founding teams received about 2% of venture dollars. Without those two companies, there would be no record, Invezz noted.

Our read

It would be a mistake to read too much into one canceled conference. Grace Hopper's collapse may have causes specific to AnitaB.org, and some longtime attendees have questioned how the nonprofit was run, according to community discussion on daily.dev.

The broader pattern is harder to dismiss. Women are half of new hires outside AI and a quarter inside it, and their share of core technical roles has slipped four points since 2021. The corporate money that paid for conferences, mentorship programs and recruiting events for women is drying up, while companies hire fewer entry-level workers, the group those programs helped most. If nothing changes, the gender gap in AI leadership will be wider five years from now than it is today.

None of this is fixed in place. Training narrows the usage gap. Steinberg has argued that hiring for skills rather than degrees and past titles would bring more women into AI roles. Companies that report AI adoption as a single number could break it out by gender and seniority, along with AI hiring and promotions, and see whether their own data looks like LinkedIn's.

There is also a reputational cost. Many of the companies that pulled back from events like Grace Hopper still pitch themselves to candidates as good places for women to work. The people they are recruiting can see who actually gets hired into AI roles.

What comes next

AnitaB.org says it will contact registrants about refunds by Oct. 26 and expects to share more about its plans in the coming weeks, including whether Grace Hopper will return.

The next Women in the Workplace report from LeanIn.Org and McKinsey will show whether companies have kept cutting programs for women. Future LinkedIn data will show whether women's share of AI hires holds at 26% or keeps slipping.