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.
For context, the first Grace Hopper Celebration was 1994, and had been held for the last 20 consecutive years. Long before DEI.
But when the powers that be are intent to kill off "DEI", and their definition includes anything related to women, this is what happens. Too many business cowards don't want to have problems with their merger, acquisition, IPO, FCC license, etc for supporting celebrating a great American like this, just because she was a woman.
There was definitely gender-based affirmative action benefitting women in 1994 - the term DEI is newer than that (as far as I'm aware), but the concept is definitely not.
According to the Wikipedia article on the event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper_Celebration_of_Wo...), "In 1994, Anita Borg and Telle Whitney founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. With the initial idea of creating a conference by and for women computer scientists, Borg and Whitney met over dinner, with a blank sheet of paper, having no idea how to start a conference, and started to plan out their vision. The first Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing was held in Washington, D.C., in June 1994, and brought together 500 technical women.".
Having a specific conference for women in computing is definitely a DEI concern; from the very beginning, the entire point of having a formal celebration of Grace Hopper was to be a locus for this female-specific conference. Grace Hopper's importance to this conference is that she was a woman, not that she invented FLOW-MATIC.
Grace Hopper graduated from Yale with a PhD in 1933. In 1952, Professor Bessie Lee Gambrill became the first woman at receive tenure at Yale.
Many women mathematicians in computer science worked in the field because they were denied a university career path because of their gender.
As an example of how late gender equality arrived, Olga Taussky-Todd (Caltech) held only a “research associate” title from 1957 until Caltech made her its first female full professor in 1971.
It is not wrong to celebrate a more enlightened world by highlighting its trailblazers and encouraging others to follow their footsteps in breaking barriers.
If I ever got famous, I would hope that people would remember me posthumously by what I did rather than by the fact that I was the "first Bangladeshi" to do whatever. You just mentioned two women professors at Yale and Caltech. I am sure they did amazing things. But your post just says they were women and contains no reference to their actual lives' work.
It is useful to study both their inventions and to learn about the history of discrimination against women. One doesn't make the other more or less valuable to understand. I was responding to a post about gender discrimination with examples.
Both are quite famous. Their work, and summaries of their work, are easily found if you are legitimately curious. Olga Taussky-Todd was a pioneer in matrices theory - certainly relevant and impactful in today's AI, LLM world. I see someone gave a separate synopsis of Admiral Grace Hopper's accomplishments.
Grace Hopper invented COBOL (or its direct predecessor anyway), did a lot of foundational work with compiler design, and generally (if you'll pardon the pun) led the deep integration of computer systems and programs into the military in the very early days. but yes, we should be focusing on what they've done, not just who they are.
I don’t think they were expressing concern, just the fact.
I read it as a damning indictment against anti-“DEI” fanatics that they’re on the wrong side of history when they push the envelope too far in the direction of “merit-based hiring”, as if DEI was something relatively-recently concocted.
Laughably, in the days before “DEI”, “merit-based hiring” usually equated to “good old boys club”. Based on the industries in which I’ve been involved, it’s still very much “good old boys club”, despite best efforts for DEI to try to make things more merit-based.
Nobody claims that political appointments are "merit based." They're by definition political. But university admissions and employment are supposed to be merit based, not political.
He’s a carnival barker. That doesn’t change the fact that political appointments are political—they don’t have any relevance to merit-based admissions to universities or job hiring.
In fact, the distinction between political appointments and those other things is critical. In politics, you appoint people to reward your various constituencies. That’s just how politics works. But jobs and universities shouldn’t work that way.
> But university admissions and employment are supposed to be merit based, not political.
University admissions were not part of the DEI movement, they were part of the affirmative action movement. By conflating the two you’re unfairly grouping things of different types to tear them down together.
In "Having a specific conference for women in computing is definitely a DEI concern" I take concern to be the noun, Mirriam-Webster (1a) or (2) has something that relates or belongs to one : affair, from the context this would seem to be the definition that fits: DEI relates to such a conference, they're interested in it, rather than definition (1b) an uneasy state of blended interest, uncertainty, and apprehension which would lead to "concerning" but makes no sense in the context, as you note.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” — Anatole France
Treating people equally does not mean treating them the same (or, why don't healthy people get to be hospital patients, too?).
> You're talking about a generation of white men who were told growing up that treating people differently based on skin color was the worst thing they could do.
There’s a linguistic sleight of hand that you’re using here that belies your emotional attachment to this topic.
It’s not that “treating people differently based on skin color” was the worst thing, it was that using skin color as a basis for discrimination, harassment, and even violence was the worst thing you could do.
You’re equating these two things:
- giving children who grew up in zip codes with terrible education outcomes a handicap during college admissions
- lynching
… which I find laughably monstrous and points to a convenient ignorance of history
> It’s not that “treating people differently based on skin color” was the worst thing, it was that using skin color as a basis for discrimination
Those are the same thing. "Discrimination" literally means "treating people differently based on skin color." Which is what the universities were doing.
> giving children who grew up in zip codes with terrible education outcomes a handicap during college admissions
That's not what universities were doing. We know that because they said so! In Harvard's brief to the Supreme Court, for example, Harvard argued that it had no "workable race-neutral alternative" that would achieve its goal of "diversity." Harvard.Br.52-53.
What you're describing--"giving children who grew up in zip code with terrible education outcomes a handicap"--is a race-neutral approach that focuses on socioeconomic factors. Harvard told the Supreme Court that such approaches would not work to achieve its goals: To achieve diversity targets without considering race, "Harvard would have to give socioeconomic tips of disproportionate magnitude ... so large that they would 'essentially automatically put[] in any applicant ... with an average probability of admission.'" Harvard.Br.53.
> What you're describing--"giving children who grew up in zip code with terrible education outcomes a handicap"--is a race-neutral approach that focuses on socioeconomic factors.
Well you also conveniently ignore that it would be an instant victim of Goodhart’s law. There are few, if any, race neutral approaches that can’t be gamed - and the only motivation for such approaches is to satisfy those who are so fervently against the idea of affirmative action. In fact, whenever such approaches are attempted, we see that the rich continue to game the system and the expense of the lower middle class (see Lori Laughlin), so it’s really just the stupid rich kids who benefit the most from “merit-based” admissions, not some humble, poor, but brilliant, child of the wrong race.
Did you go to school in the US? There’s absolutely no shortage of educational opportunities. I’m not sure why you’re arguing about Harvard. It impacts such a small percentage of the population. It’s also hilariously one of the institutions most mired by legacy admissions and admissions based on donations. Maybe use the California system instead?
Edit: also I’m not going to get in some autistic Twitter debate about what “discrimination” means. It’s convenient for those opposed to systems and regulations that benefit an oppressed people that anything not immaculately meritocratic can be described as “discriminatory”. Am I “discriminating” against my child Peter when I give his brother Paul a cookie because his other brother Pedro stole Paul’s cookie at lunch?
> There are few, if any, race neutral approaches that can’t be gamed
The race-conscious approaches are heavily gamed too. The minority students at elite universities are rarely people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Most often, they’re the children of affluent minorities, often elites from latin america or africa who have no connection to discrimination in the U.S.
Ironically, you’re engaged in some wild racial stereotyping by flipping back and forth between race and economic circumstances. Do you think there aren’t lots of affluent minorities in the U.S.? Harvard doesn’t let in poor minorities.
> the only motivation for such approaches is to satisfy those who are so fervently against the idea of affirmative action
Yes, institutions must satisfy those who are against grouping people together by race and treating them differently on that basis. That’s not only the law, but the law is correct.
> so it’s really just the stupid rich kids who benefit the most from “merit-based” admissions, not some humble, poor, but brilliant, child of the wrong race.
The evidence shows that the people who benefit the most from objective, merit-based admissions is smart lower-class kids of all races.
> There’s absolutely no shortage of educational opportunities.
That doesn’t justify grouping people based on race and treating them differently.
> I’m not sure why you’re arguing about Harvard. It impacts such a small percentage of the population.
Have you read any of the record in SFFA? Harvard just happened to be the headline name. Almost every institution does it. The medical school data I posted up thread is aggregated across all medical schools.
And elite institutions like Harvard are especially important because they’re gatekeepers. That’s how racial preferences jumped the air gap from universities to corporations. While universities had a carve out for affirmative action, employers never did. Race-conscious policies have always been illegal in the employment context (as the Supreme Court recently affirmed 9-0). But Ivy-educated people took those ideas from universities into the workplace and a bunch of Harvard-educated lawyers gave very bad advice.
> Am I “discriminating” against my child Peter when I give his brother Paul a cookie because his other brother Pedro stole Paul’s cookie at lunch
In this hypo, neither Paul nor Peter’s cookie was stolen. People aren’t reincarnations of their oppressed ancestors.
Everything about your argument hinges on your core take that "making decisions based on race" is fundamentally wrong, no matter the decision. Since I disagree with you on that, mostly on the basis that the world didn't pop into existence yesterday and I believe that we have a moral and ethical duty to make the best of the shit situation that we and our ancestors have created, there's really no purpose about arguing about stupid specifics on a point-by-point basis.
Especially since your arguments often contradict themselves and you transparently use specific details not because they are strong but because they are rhetorically useful (e.g. referring to "elite" institutions in the case of certain races being less likely to be admitted, but then referring to all institutions when speaking about whether merit-based admissions improve outcomes for lower income students). This is a form of gish-galloping.
Zip codes with terrible education outcomes are almost certainly proxies for zip codes with lots of black and hispanic students living in them. The fact that race correlates highly with zip code is why it is illegal under laws banning racial discrimination in financial services for banks and other loan-granting financial service companies to use zip code data as an input for computing the likelihood that a borrower will repay their loan. And if it's reasonable to legally ban moneylenders from looking at zip code data to determine likelihood of paying back a loan because it's a good proxy for race, it's reasonable to ban colleges from using it as a reason to give a handicap to college admissions for the same reason.
Centuries of discrimination against whole populations (women, non-whites) and I'm supposed to get bent out of shape that a university is preferring to admit people of those discriminated groups?
Given all the other advantages my male whiteness has benefited me, I think I can look past that.
(Not willfully blind, just keeping everything in perspective.)
> Centuries of discrimination against whole populations (women, non-whites) and I'm supposed to get bent out of shape that a university is preferring to admit people of those discriminated groups?
Yes, not because you’re white, but because as a citizen you have a moral obligation to help ensure that our institutions treat citizens as individuals, not as “groups.” Individuals living today shouldn’t be treated as if they personally suffered that discrimination by grouping them together based on skin color with people in the past who did. That doesn’t mean ignoring the effects of past discrimination. But those effects are baked into people’s individual circumstances and can be evaluated in those terms. Rich people should be treated alike morally and poor people should be treated alike morally regardless of the individual path dependency that led them both to the same place.
You can’t have your group identity cake and eat it too. I can’t demand better treatment than a similarly situated white person because other Bangladeshis are poor. I’m not them any more than you are them. Conversely, it’s wrong to discriminate against my wife’s poor white extended family members because other white people are rich. My kids go to private school with WASPs, some of whom definitely have slave owner legacy money. My wife’s family aren’t those people, and it’s racism to arbitrarily group them together.
Don't confuse rational discourse for "victimhood". Finding reasoned discourse difficult to understand and centering it around "victimhood" is ironically an effeminate trait.
It’s not really that simple. Read some of the accounts of the conference from recent years. The conference was falling apart even when companies were sponsoring it. I don’t know about last year’s conference but before that there were a lot of bad experiences and reports that it was turning into more of a job fair than tech conference, but even that wasn’t going well.
It was also getting very expensive. When a conference has a long list of sponsors and tickets also start at $600 minimum, it’s hard to keep that going in a year like this when everyone is dealing with large token spend budgets.
They likely could have survived with a right-sized event but they aimed higher than their budget allowed and hoped the money would appear at the last minute. It did not.
> It was also getting very expensive. When a conference has a long list of sponsors and tickets also start at $600 minimum
im in the conference business but just fyi thats actually cheap - venue, av and f&b alone cost many millions for a conference this size. a good rule of thumb on cost is $1-2000 per head depending on quality of event.
> But when the powers that be are intent to kill off "DEI", and their definition includes anything related to women, this is what happens.
It's the other way around -- they want to do away with anything to do with women, and they used this DEI boogeyman to get everyone scared enough to go along with it.
> Before we try to rehabilitate "DEI" let's not forget what it was and is: universities and employers grouping people together based on skin color and treating them differently based on it, by applying wildly different standards.
One of the major problems with "DEI" as used in the vernacular is that people have trouble agreeing on the meaning of the term.
This results in partisans inventing their own fantastical definitions of it, which they use as bogeymen to encourage misogyny or race baiting.
DEI practices I've witnessed at the companies I've worked at include:
* Creating separate interview pipelines for "diverse" candidates, with multiple chances to re-try failed interviews (Asian and white male applicants get one chance).
* Financial penalties when quotas on the basis of race and gender were not met. Of course, the company portrayed them as bonuses rewarded for reaching inclusion milestones, but ultimately a bonus and a penalty are indistinguishable.
* Designating separate headcount pools for women and URM hires.
What was even more concerning was that the people who were privately the biggest proponents of these practices would, like you, publicly condemn the idea that DEI involves discrimination as racist and misogynist.
The confusion is the point. People who want to have racial preferences in admissions and hiring can’t use the phrase “racial preferences,” because it’s always been unpopular. So they used the term “affirmative action” instead. But that also came to be understood as meaning racial preferences. So then they switched to “DEI.” Now they’re throwing that label under the bus too. I suspect within a few years we’ll have a different label.
IME black corporate board members typically come from a military, law, or medical background. White board members have a much more diverse set of backgrounds, including "son of former board member".
Your 85% white figure doesn’t tell you anything. Educated and liberal white people have an out-group preference, which is why universities and medical schools discriminate against white people despite being run by white people.
This really didn't happen over here in Europe at all. That was mostly a US thing. Here it just faded out as it couldn't be leveraged.
At our place, it did not influence hiring decisions other than having a formal DEI position in the org which was disposed of almost immediately when it was seen as a cost and not a benefit.
Trump's threats were international and European businesses and media were very much talking about it at the time. Here's two examples from April 2025, the first is in Swedish:
I work in academia in Europe and, as I am a native English speaker, a longtime side gig is language revision of grant applications for other academics. I have worked with a hell of a lot of them in many fields of the humanities. A lot of grant-seekers were using American-inspired DEI language in their applications in the late 2010s and early 2020s, but this began to dwindle by late in Biden's term. I would agree with the claim made above that this particular rhetorical movement just ran out of steam as time passed and society quietly shifted, independent of Trump.
There's a big difference between suing people for prima facie illegal hiring practices and suing people for holding Grace Hopper celebrations. We probably shouldn't conflate them. Your links, as best as I can tell, are about the former sort of activity - hiring or paying people differently on the basis of protected characteristics.
You understand that none of these companies believe the merits of why they are settling?
They are settling because, like the law firms Trump suborned, they didn't want the MAGA rage; especially in the case of Texas, where Trump may (correctly as it goes) think Paxton is a disgusting slug of a man, but still vocally supports him.
The legal system was just the venue. All of this is bullshit corporate spinelessness in the face of threats without merit, especially in firms like Deloitte, who do not want their M&A interfered with.
OK. That is fine. It was literally a question so as to work out if we were on the same page for what I wrote subsequently. I will make a mental note that the phrasing doesn't come across that way.
As an aside I think my brain jumped the track and had me thinking I was replying to another commenter I'd replied to already -- who wrote a sibling comment to yours.
Harvard lost due to obvious "anti" racist discrimination. It still seems to discriminate against whites and asians and in favour of blacks, but not as heavily as it used to.
Every statement from company officials such as "we only employ women" or "toxic males", can be used as evidence at court. It is very difficult to prove bias from vague sanitized corporate language, direct "activist" statements make proving such bias very easy. For example recent lawsuit with IBM!
But I highly doubt most companies were saying that or implying it. There's more to DEI than having minority quotas. Would DEI practices such as campaigns to encourage more men to go into nursing, midwifery or teaching be targeted too?
> These aren't illegal and have never been the problem.
This is being contested right now. And so, unless you enjoy getting sued, you won't do it.
Just because you agree with the current administration on certain topics, does not mean that you necessarily agree with them on all topics. This is a case of you projecting your opinion based on what your beliefs without checking whether reality matches.
Few companies said that they only employ women. That would be too overt.
But plenty of companies very publicly instituted policies to financially penalize their employees if they fail to meet gender quotas. Remember, a policy of giving a bonus when an "inclusion milestone" of X% women in technical roles is reached is fundamentally the same thing as instituting a penalty when that X% quota is missed.
Yeah there's a decent chance that DEI practices to do this violate neutrally-written US civil rights law, and also make women doing nursing or midwifery angry enough to use lawsuits in order to end these programs.
There's a case going through the courts for Red Hat right now where they based managerial bonuses on how diverse their teams were, which reportedly led to them pushing out white males.
While cynical, there is a lot of truth to your statement. I wish the activist type would realize that they are actually being used, but it appears there isn't much chance they will ever listen to the old dogs in this game.
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.
Post is very clear there is also less interest from individuals to participate. Tech jobs are going through implosion now (for several reasons), and working in tech is not so attractive anymore.
> Unlike past events, this year, both individual registrations
As a matter of fact non-white, non-male individuals are disadvantaged in many societies. The consequences of improving the equality of opportunities may sometimes feel like disadvantage to groups that received preferential treatment before. The goal needs to be a levelled playing field for everyone, not denying inequality and punishing those who point out and strive to improve those social injustices.
Collective punishment or priviledges baced on race or sex is ... racism/sexism, pure and simple. If you want to help disadvantaged people then help those who are disadvantaged. But that's harder and generally requires you to actually show that they are disadvantaged rather than making racist/sexist claims.
Real equality isn't obtainable. What we are doing currently is just moving things around. The classic case of the vocal minority being louder then another minority. This isn't creating honest fairness, it just highlights certain groups to the detriment of others. Since LGBTQ has become louder, disabled people are being more forgotten again. Accessibility is HARD, so, just cater to LGBTQ and your corporate conscience is magically cleared up. Activists HATE this insight, since they are also blind to the needs of even smaller groups. I know what I am talking about, I am disabled, and I am watching the "landscape" since 35 years.
If your knee jerk reaction is to downvote this, I am not surprised, because, you know, that just underlines my point.
Is a bit like with democracy. Its the best system we have... Everything we, as humans, do, will eventually be unfair, because, frankly, humans are just not fair. Sure, a select few have high goals, and might even DTRT... But thats always just a small group. The rest of us will try to take advantage of others, some coniscously, some unconsciously. Humankind will only be fair once it has ended.
I don't see how you could conclude that capitalism is the best system when it is the only one the west has tried since the end of feudalism. I think there is still plenty of progress to be made and capitalism creates more negative incentives than anything positive.
This is just my subjective experience, but the only people I've ever seen complain about "DEI" in real life were the most incompetent men I've ever met. These people were clearly aware, on some level, that "DEI" is a threat to them specifically.
We had a physical laborer position in the datacenter (lift and shift) get "flagged for diversity (female)" and sit open and unfilled for a year because we were unable to recruit a woman. THIS is the kind of thing that causes problems: some HR analyst pulled the datacenter team stats, saw there were no women working in the grunt team, and decided to try and change that by force. We had LOTS of women in the datacenter group, majority in analysts and coordination, pretty balanced overall, but just none in the grunts. No thoughts were given to why women didn't and likely wouldn't apply for that role. By god, I tried. The few I got to interview noped out once the job responsibilities were made clear. We eventually closed the position unfilled as part of a scaledown/budget giveback.
I'm sure an argument could be made about how the org should seek equity by restructuring the way the team works to eliminate the need for physical strength and replace it with machines, allowing any operative to do the job, but those arguments never seem to come with a budget attached to buy lifts or powered carts to allow us to change the way things have been done in the computing center for 50+ years. Talk is cheap, companies are cheaper. Furthermore, overcoming societal norms such that a woman would choose to apply for that role over a less physically taxing, traditionally male-coded one is likely to be more difficult even than finding budget for machines.
That's just your company's HR being morons. Or more likely, they were doing their best to make sure the position didn't get filled because that would cost money.
My point was that HR "just being morons" adds fuel to the fire for people pushing anti-diversity narratives. It feels stupid, because it is stupid. It came from a good place (stop shutting women out of jobs) and devolved into the typical corporate "GMD says we have to increase diversity by 10% this year" metric-chasing bureaucratic crapola. It's not even the only similar instance in my career, but I won't be doxxing myself further.
Yeah, that's a corporate problem, not a DEI problem. I agree it lends credence to the anti-DEI arguments, but that is due to those people's exiting narrow mindedness and all or nothing thinking.
This is just my subjective experience, but the only people I've ever seen complain about "anti-DEI" in real life were the most incompetent women I've ever met. These people were clearly aware, on some level, that "anti-DEI" is a threat to them specifically.
The fact that you couldn't muster an actual response but just complained about the plagerization of your comment adds another data point to my experience.
"The fact that you couldn't muster an actual response"
I did.
What is the purpose of your behavior? Do you think this will change anyone's opinions? Are you just trying to bait me? Are you angry and using this as an outlet?
Because responding in this childish way, parrotting everything I say, just supports my original point. If your intent was to get people to reconsider their opinion of people like you, you're failing. You just make yourself look bad.
So what is the purpose? Wasting people's time? Making them angry at you? To what end?
What is the purpose of your behavior? Do you think this will change anyone's opinions? Are you just trying to bait me? Are you angry and using this as an outlet?
Because responding in this childish way, bitching over everything I post, just supports my original point. If your intent was to get people to reconsider their opinion of people like you, you're failing. You just make yourself look bad.
So what is the purpose? Wasting people's time? Making them angry at you? To what end?
This is just my subjective experience, but the only people I've ever seen complain about "anti-DEI" in real life were the most incompetent women I've ever met. These people were clearly aware, on some level, that "anti-DEI" is a threat to them specifically.
Your post would be way less hilarious if you refrained from using words like "bitches" in a post arguing for DEI! Derogatory sexist terms don't really help your cuase.
The federal government has cancelled funding for a ton of genuinely useful scientific research because "o noes not the DEI monster". (Not to mention just putting the word "diversity" in your proposal has been grounds for rejection, even if it you're talking about, say "wifi antenna diversity".)
But sure, I'm glad now you can say whatever you want in your code comments. Seems like a good trade. /s
Overcorrection is only a natural reaction to a previously even larger push in the other direction. The correction was sorely needed and wel'll just have to live with a little bit of collateral damage until things normalize.
Hitler and Nazi Germany did not start with the Holocaust. It was instead the end result. Something can be compared to Hitler or compared to the Nazis or their rhetoric without being literally the Holocaust.
Keep in mind that Hitler and the Nazis took power starting in 1933 but forcing jews to carry identification (i.e. add israel or sara to non-jewish names and add jewish identification marks to paperwork) didn't start until mid-to-late 1938 with Kristallnacht following only months later in Nov 1938.
But in that early period however Nazis began
- gutting research institution
- literally destroying research institutions and research. (ex the famous 1933 book burning picture was from the demolition of the Institute for Sexual Research which studied gender non conformity, intersex traits, and broader topics in the LGBTQIA academic space. Also was where the first transgender sex reassignment surgery took place.)
- expelling academics
- dismantling social programs
- pressuring companies into aligning with state ideological and industrial objectives
- seizing control of, attacking, or privatising domestic and foreign media
- pressuring domestic and foreign entertainment into aligning with Nazi ideological stances
- punishing, oppressing, and expelling political and cultural enemies of the party from the military and civic institutions.
- converting prisons into work camps.
- building out detention facilities/prisons for "illegals" with deplorable conditions with intent to make them suffer as long as possible. These would later become concentration camps and then death camps once crowding became too extreme. And notably this began with the romani population in the early 1930s who Nazis believed to be criminals illegally present within the country.
--------------------
Nazi germany was so much more than just the Holocaust and genocide of the Jewish people. They were part of it however they were the conclusion not the start.
The straw man is obvious and you are being disingenuous. The comment you are replying did not at all imply that "[r]educing funding for something sometimes harmful" was a crime on the same level as the Holocaust, or any such thing. It is you making that assertion; your straw man.
It is very obvious, surely, that the comment was a dark, sardonic point about the tendency for "anticipatory obedience" in the Trump era (calling AI "superintelligence" etc).
That is to say, stopping doing something fully legal and uncontroversial out of the fear of reprisals that are ultimately the result of a government (the Trump administration) acting beyond their bounds; there is no reason at all for companies to stop their DEI initiatives when Trump's power is limited to federal institutions, and there is even less reason for them to withdraw sponsorship.
Anticipatory obedience absolutely is part of why major German (and US) firms ended up complicit in the Holocaust.
Companies engaging in anticipatory obedience, taking away programs that are still addressing inequality of opportunity, are on that slippery slope. The last couple of years have made it easier to understand how companies get captured by extremism and illegality.
(Law firms especially; Trump has broken, humiliated, defanged and belittled law firms who took on merit-based cases against him and that is part of why corporations are backing out of DEI initiatives; their law firms cannot be counted on to argue for them)
It doesn’t say anyone pulled out at the last minute.
I think we’re trying to put on a very big conference and hoping that big sponsors would come through at the last minute to make the numbers work.
They’ve had some problems in the recent years. It even made NPR headlines for cops having to show up. Everyone who hasn’t heard of the conference until now is assuming the sponsors are entirely to blame but the conference was not doing well for a couple years.
>The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this
Oh but they were about this. This is the common trend of people thinking that "the good ones" are implicitly exempted from their general and sweeping attacks on $THING. C.f. the hardline anti-immigration voter who thinks that the guy who mows their lawn obviously won't be included in the crackdowns. If you attack the whole concept of DEI (as many did – not necessarily you), then you are in fact attacking events celebrating the achievements of women in fields where they're poorly represented.
>C.f. the hardline anti-immigration voter who thinks that the guy who mows their lawn obviously won't be included in the crackdowns.
huh, that's pretty bizarre, at least here in Australia (where in recent years immigration has exploded to 2x ~ 3x that of the USA), all the anti-immigration voters are sincerely hoping the guy who mows their lawn grew up across town where his wife's sister now lives.
the crackdowns are for the economic migrants just taking a lifestyle arbitrage
ultimately, immigration into large developed nations is an act of altruism, which, like most things in life, cannot scale indefinitely (much to the chagrin of business owners, women, arts students, etc.) - which is not nice, but is true.
A hardline anti-immigration voter is probably less likely to employ a likely-illegal-immigrant guy to mow their lawn than someone who is pro-immigration.
Similarly, someone who has actually attended the Grace Hopper conference is more likely to be pro-DEI than someone who has never attended and doesn't care about it happening.
I don't see how these probability claims are relevant. To avoid going off on a tangent, let's leave my immigration analogy out of this.
My basic point was that when people attack DEI in general, they create an environment that's more hostile to a conference like this one. They may say "oh, but obviously I wasn't talking about things like that". However, words have meaning. If you attack DEI as such then you attack all instances of it – not just the ones that happen to irk you.
This point has nothing to do with the likely views of the people attending the Grace Hopper Celebration.
> My basic point was that when people attack DEI in general, they create an environment that's more hostile to a conference like this one. They may say "oh, but obviously I wasn't talking about things like that". However, words have meaning. If you attack DEI as such then you attack all instances of it – not just the ones that happen to irk you.
That's one possible response; another possible response is "I've never heard of the Grace Hopper conference, but now that I have heard of it, I was definitely talking about things like that when I attacked DEI in general, I'm glad the people running it aren't getting funding anymore".
My own position as someone who was previously aware of the Grace Hopper conference (I know women who have attended in the past) is that I don't have a problem in principle with celebrating Grace Hopper or even with people of arbitrary demographic groups, such as women, self-organizing to do a thing for themselves; but I did view it as a women-in-tech-specific conference that I would not have attended or sought to attend because I am not a woman. I wouldn't have donated my own money to it, and I'm not particularly upset if the reason they're canceling it now is because they can't find corporate sponsors. Certainly I'm not gonna change my mind about opposing DEI programs on the grounds that it affects corporate willingness to sponsor a particular women-in-tech conference.
> The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this, and thus it would appear this may be collateral damage.
This is not the case at all. There have been ample people complaining about this stuff for years. While there are some people who are upset at various policies for other reasons there really is a battery of people who just genuinely don't want to see minority representation in the workplace. Oftentimes these people dress up their true complaints in softer ones but you really can see people like Chris Rufo pushing for a world where minorities are not in positions of power or authority.
I have personally observed people at my workplace (Google) complaining about any funded attendance at Grace Hopper as discrimination against men.
> 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.
That GHC has had a lot of problems in the past several years. The ticket prices were getting excessive and the conference itself was wandering off course.
Even the current website looks like something that would be hard to justify under most conference travel budget requests: It’s hard to find the actually technical content among the speakers, even though they’re claiming 700+ speakers.
Some of the top selling points are finding employers who are hiring and growing your network. Most companies have tightened up their conference budgets to focus on educational material, not events focus on recruiting people to other companies. Everyone knows conferences will have companies recruiting, but when recruiting is one of the primary selling points it’s more job fair than conference.
The conference has also been problematic on many levels in the past few years. It made news headlines in 2023 for conflict about too many men showing up and arguments about whether or not they were really transgender. The police have been called. They’ve been flirting with political ideologies like Thiel-associated key speakers trying to make the theme of the event encouraging young women to drop out of college. The operations have been a mess from a lot of the reports.
Everyone in these comments is assuming anti-DEI, but everything I heard about the conference was a growing dumpster fire and cash grab for years. I think they finally collapsed when they tried to grow too big after years of bad experiences for their sponsors combined with companies facing increasing AI spend who weren’t interested in spending thousands of dollars to send employees to a conference where recruiting to other jobs was one of the main selling points.
DEI didn’t implode; it’s not an implosion when it’s shot at from the outside by malicious actors intent on destroying something they don’t understand and can only kneejerk react to out of unreasoning fear.
This isn’t collateral, this was the plan, the planners were just too stupid to see the natural consequences of their plan. See also the price of diesel.
What does this even mean? Every initiative is kept alive by money. It was very clearly attacked by the Trump administration, and once they started attacking, DEI initiatives stopped. Why else do you think the "implosions", apparently happening all the time, were finally too much to sustain around 2025?
When did DEI go too far, and why? I am not aware of any anti-DEI position that thinks it was ever an acceptable practice. It has been resisted since the 80s.
Seems like there is obviously a spectrum of positions here and various people have found themselves calling certain positions "DEI" or "anti-DEI" or "affirmative action" or "racist" depending on which positions they hold and where a particular institution lies on it. For example:
1. A company that hires mainly based on on-paper qualifications (which, due to existing disparities in experience and education, means in practice that they hire fewer historically disadvantaged minorities)
2. A company that, believing that talent or merit is more equitably distributed
among groups than on-paper qualifications may suggest, goes out of their way to interview a greater proportion of historically disadvantaged minority groups than necessarily would naturally apply to their positions (to discover those as-of-yet-unrecognized talents), and tries to hire based on actual merit and ability rather than on-paper qualifications.
3. A company that has the goal of creating a more equitable and diverse workforce with groups that more closely matches their proportions of the population. They spend a lot of time and effort actively recruiting and seeking out employees from underrepresented minority groups, meaning that it is effectively easier for minority groups to get interviews at this company for this position, but still tries to hire based on actual ability and talent once they get to the interview stage
4. A company which, accounting for the disparities in distribution of measurable abilities of groups, tries to hire based on within-group ability rather than between-group ability; for example trying to hire the top 10th percentile of black, or top 10th percentile asian, or top 10th percentile male, rather than top 10th percentile of all applicants in aggregate (which would likely be overrepresented by over-performing groups). This in practice means using a different standard for different groups, but using the within group distribution of talent; they may say they are "considering race/sex/disability as one of many factors they take into account"
5. A company that in practice has an explicit hiring quota based on the race/sex/etc. of applicants, in order to create a more equitable or diverse workforce that matches the relative sizes of those groups in the local population.
6. A company that, in order to reverse historical and current disparities in achievement within society, actively discriminates in the opposite direction as historical trend, with the goal of evening the playing field more quickly.
7. A company that, in order to address historical grievances and grant some amount of justice to victims of discrimination and oppression, actively and purposefully discriminates against privileged majority and overachieving groups, favoring underprivileged and underachieving groups, up to and including reparations for past injustices to remedy current disparities.
I'm pretty sure 1-3 are legal and 4-7 are illegal, but I'm not a lawyer so that's just my guess. Some hardliners might attack 2 as going too far, but somewhere between 3 and 4 is probably the more common point at which anti-DEI people draw their line.
The history is more than a little complicated. I model it as a set of separate overton windows in different institutions that have shifted, widened, and contracted over the last 60 or so years. So in this picture, courts arguably expanded it to 4-6 in the 80s, but have retreated back to around 2-3 since then. Legislature has mostly stayed around 2-3 with a handful of radicals pushing higher or lower with low-to-moderate success. Academia has been around 5-7 since the 70s. Executive has mostly hovered around 3-5 until Trump. Media/popular culture, big shift up to 6-7 in 2014-2021, retreating back to 3-4 now. Also, motte-and-baileys are common here; pro-DEI activists sometimes frame it as something like 2, but often advocate up to 6 or 7 (e.g. "antiracism" in the 2020s peak). anti-DEI activists often say they simply oppose quotas and illegal discrimination (4-7), but in practice sometimes attack even 2-3 as being too much.
> They spend a lot of time and effort actively recruiting and seeking out employees from underrepresented minority groups, meaning that it is effectively easier for minority groups to get interviews at this company for this position, but still tries to hire based on actual ability and talent once they get to the interview stage
Discriminating against candidates on the basis of protected class at the application review stage is no less illegal than discriminating during interviews.
#2 may or many not be illegal, depending what you mean by, "goes out of their way to interview a greater proportion of historically disadvantaged minority groups than necessarily would naturally apply to their positions." If this involves using protected class as a factor, in any way, on which candidates to advance to interviews, then yes it is illegal discrimination.
part of the issue is that there are multiple laws and legal frameworks even at the federal level in the US that are kind of contradictory here. See "disparate impact" law, where using a neutral standard (such as a background check, or an ability test) that affects different protected groups differently can be considered illegal discrimination. 2 might be illegal, but 1 might be illegal too in the other direction! It kind of seems like the only solution is to basically maintain plausible deniability and try your hardest not to leave an auditable paper trail about any of the reasoning you use to hire a candidate or not.
Fear of disparate impact claims do not justify discrimination on the basis of protect class. This was argued all the way up to the Supreme Court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricci_v._DeStefano
Furthermore, disparate impact theory has been largely rolled back in recent years.
The Sheetz disparate impact case was in 2024, post Ricci. Griggs is still the law of the land even though some justices have signaled they might want to revisit it.
Ahh, the imaginary butthurt of those for whom “discrimination” has only ever been a shorthand for “having to compete on a level playing field”.
Trump (and his ilk) presented a straw man to the dumb, then shot the straw man, without ever thinking of the innocent people standing down range of their target, which included the dumb the whole time.
The same administration who, just yesterday hired a new press secretary who was very obviously not hired for qualifications but instead for being a blonde.
The implication here that the DEI movement had done nothing wrong is rather naive… it wasn’t all bad, but there was a lot of bad things happening to answer for.
Doesn't seem like that's implied at all. There is no implication about whether it is good or bad actually, but if the fact it was attacked is a bad thing, the only inference is that on balance it did more harm than good.
Many DEI programs were highly discriminatory if not outright racist towards certain minorities that were seen as less worthy. Asians and Jewish individuals were often heavily discriminated against via DEI initiatives. The list goes on.
These programs were, in theory, well intentioned but to suggest they did nothing wrong is simply factually incorrect.
The true motivations of the anti-DEI movement were obvious when they attacked DEI as a concept rather than just the corruption they claimed existed within the system, and proceeded to do things like blame plane crashes on the hiring of black pilots. There were already laws on the books against hiring discrimination.
Maybe a few naive people in the movement had good intentions but they were clearly dupes for what was at its core a right-wing white supremacist and incel ideology.
And the proof is in the pudding. Has the anti-DEI movment (and current administration) created a truly fair and equitable society that focuses on merit in the absence of gender and race? No. It has created a society in which the contributions of anyone other than white men are systemically attacked, torn down and even erased from the public record.
> they attacked DEI as a concept rather than just the corruption they claimed existed
People who crusade against DEI generally think that the concept is corruption, rather than being an unrelated side matter.
> There were already laws on the books against hiring discrimination.
Those are exactly the laws being used to attack DEI practices, though they were by consensus not previously wielded against clear violations that were intended virtuously.
>Has the anti-DEI movment (and current administration) created a truly fair and equitable society that focuses on merit in the absence of gender and race? No.
Has the DEI movment (and previous administration) created a truly fair and equitable society that focuses on merit in the absence of gender and race? No.
>It has created a society in which the contributions of anyone other than white men are systemically attacked, torn down and even erased from the public record.
It has created a society in which the contributions of anyone other than white men are systemically exalted, praised and even defended from the public record.
You could say that it was easier to practice before the executive (that routinely hires the dumbest troglodytes - whose only qualification is loyalty to the fuhrer - into positions of power) started a witchhunt against anyone practicing it.
Since the only god our corporatations worship goes by power and money, they all started tripping over themselves to kiss the ring.
I should be the last one to defend the existing system.
But IMHO DEI answers the wrong question.
Worthwhile lives does not come from equal access to the hamster wheel.
I am much more pro UBI structures og negative taxation - which are inherently difficult to make descriminatory as there is no personal judgement of the people to receive it.
You probably don't actually want corporations that do intrinsically care about being able to violate federal civil rights and anti-discrimination law, and are willing to lose money and give up influence in order to keep doing so.
My friend, as soon as the felon-in-chief started flexing his muscles, half of them suddenly announced that they wouldn't even support a fucking pride parade. Engagement between '24 and '25 dropped like a meteor.
(Showing up to one, or writing a check to one, is as far as I or anyone else on this planet is aware, is not in violation of any law, as much as MAGA would like it to be.)
There's no need to whitewash or come up with excuses for their cowardice.
When Jim Whitehurst left Red Hat, he was replaced by Paul Cormier, a complete wokee. Cormier got DEI fever and put in place a big corporate framework, led by a newly crowned VP, complete with staff.
DEI affinity groups were established, by ancestry, sexual orientation, veteran status, physical ability, neurodivergence, etc. The groups got t shirts and air time on company calls. Chatter on internal mailing lists shot upwards, often becoming political firestorms.
CEO Cormier got even crazier and started saying things about maybe not belonging at Red Hat if you didn’t buy into the complete DEI koolaid. The entire corporate leadership was using pronouns in email by then.
I was a member of the military veterans DEI group. I appreciated the t shirts and once got a backpack from a contest. It wasn’t all bad.
Some of it was overreach, and it grated on some people. But there was a glorious counter move in the works.
There was a Jewish guy that didn’t like having DEI thrust upon the company. Assessing his pool of allies, he started some quiet conversations and soon applied for a new DEI subgroup, “Jews and Judeo-Christian values”. The corporate DEI sponsors were caught off guard and approved of the group. I got to go to a DEI conference in Alabama on the company dime, a week long kumbaya fest with nice eats at a snazzy resort. Company funding was good!
A checkpoint on where Red Hat was at the time: the lead spokesperson for the Red Hat Women’s group was a muscular transgender person. That didn’t seem crazy in the context.
As the J&JCV group, we got air time and were able to give voice to our preferred messaging. Our ranks included a gay guy that was drummed out of the LGBT group for his airing of occasional conservative viewpoints. He was as welcome in our community as anyone.
Finally, the DEI leadership took a closer look and decommissioned our J&JCV subgroup. We tried to argue and appeal, and I believe we won the battle of logical arguments, but that was of no consequence. We lost our seat at the table.
It may have seemed bleak, but the winds of change were blowing. CEO Cormier was removed by IBM, after very little time in office.
Organic actions were wearing away at DEI, also. A prominent subgroup leader was taking lengthy ‘mental health breaks’ of week long duration— then boasting about it on mailing lists and encouraging others to do the same! Such things are not sustainable.
As I retired a few years later, DEI was operating at a reasonable level. Minority communities ( notably the excellent and long running Black Red Hatters group ) were bringing appropriate, positive messaging and were demonstrating the true power of diversity. Women’s groups were doing a good job of showcasing women in Tech, etc. I don’t remember anything truly crazy in my last year.
I'm lucky enough to have received one of Grace' nanosecond wires, when .. as a fresh young squib .. I attended one of her lectures and got one handed to me by the Admiral herself.
She was a huge influence on me - as a white male tech nerd - and I have long had a huge interest in women in tech, from Grace to Margaret Hamilton to Jeri Ellsworth and Anouk Wipprecht and more. Jeri's demonstration of her self-made transistors and work rebuilding a tunneling electron microscope were fascinating and rank among the most entertaining things I've seen in a hackerspace this century. Anouks' mad fashiontech excursions are positively exciting. There are many other women technologists who deserve our interest.
So its pretty unfortunate that GCH won't happen this year. I hope there are budding young squibs out there who won't see this as de-motivating with regards to their entry into the technology worlds.
Most students are probably on trips paid for by others. Many of those groups would probably not be keen to fund an itinerary-free trip to Irvine California for a few days. Even if the students were purported to want to impromptu organize.
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.
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.
But they think they can do it because they can spin it as "you did it first".
This just makes the point that there is nothing to gain by framing the issue as a grievance.
There are real prejudices and real systemic disadvantages to fix and while it's important to understand the history of them, I believe we put too much focus on that and less on what we can do to put that past behind us instead of dwelling in it.
I don't think this approach of grievances has done anybody any favour in practice.
> “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 (internally, with respect to general electoral processes)
Institutional reforms seem to go through better if done proactively. Eg, Sweden, 1990s, preempted China shock. What gave? Had the right people been voted in (at various levels)? Was there a culture of running parallel optimisations (org-Darwinist take) of status quo ante?
You might be able to apply those to how Swiss institutional-reforms (if any) preempted China shock
(or, now, how they are handling vs just avoidinh "migrant shock", orthogonally to the "resilient" demographic, popular framings, etc)
Sweden has bloc politics, i.e. no single party has the majority to govern.
The red-green bloc (left, center and greens) won a majority but the center party is playing kingmaker and refusing to let the left party into government. The left party has said from well before the election that they, reasonably, will not vote to support a government which they are not part of.
This has been due to decades of bourgeois / social democrat rat-fucking on policies, most notably disability / sick insurance reforms, after they got the left party's support votes. [1]
There is speculation that the center party would instead support the prior right wing government instead (voting with the extreme-right) - as long as the extreme right stays out of government, despite the extreme right getting all of their policies pushed through anyway. Even going so far as to withhold key votes in parliament until their immigration reforms (removing permanent residency and restricting citizenship, in this case) got passed. [2]
The short of it is that "centrist" parties are just right wing parties in disguise, in that they NEVER support leftist reforms but will happily support the right when it suits upper class economic interests.
Democracy being what it is, can be messy and nobody goes home happy. But the left of the left bloc saw the largest electoral gains in this election, so a move to the left is arguably what a growing portion of the electorate wanted. It was still a very close election, so you could frame it in many ways, but that the green-reds did see the biggest gains is fact.
You make it sound like the center party is playing both sides but as I understand it is not part of that block, and they would be OK with social democrats but not far left in government. What's wrong with that?
Well, they have said they would support the social democrat party leader as prime minister, prior to the election - as did the left and green parties and are (sort of) participating with those parties in negotiating the formation of a new government. And none have the mandates to form a government without each other. So I would say they are in fact part of the same "bloc", in some sense.
However, the left has stated that they rather reasonably won't support a government that they are not part of. The center party on the other hand has said they won't support any government that the left party is in and seem to be open to forming a government (at least not denying when being asked directly) with the right wing parties of the former government, despite that bloc losing the election.
When one party's "red lines" only seem to soften when facing the right, I think that does say something about their true intentions.
Aha ok I was wondering when I asked if you meant the internal politics or either social democrats or greens - what I think of as the two center left parties - had been going through an activist far left internal struggle (as is happening to the very separate Green Party in the UK right now).
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.
> Palahniuk was hardly the first person to use the metaphor. It's the stuff of self-help books and inspirational posters and elementary school assurances.
> In the 1970s snowflake was a disparaging term for a white man or for a black man who was seen as acting white.
> In Missouri in the early 1860s, a "Snowflake" was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery—the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people.
Tyler Durden, Don Drapper, Patrick Bateman, are all characters that you’re not supposed to want to be like but that “blackpilled” men completely miss the point and worship. There must be a name for this type of character influence. It reminds me of the “torrent nexus” trope but for people.
Correct. I wouldn’t really call them anti-heroes, however, as those are still meant to be sympathetic.
To put it less ambiguously, I’m looking for a term for a character which is written to be repulsive but a number of people in the real world misinterpret as a role model.
Yes, and it's being used ironically here. The people who pointed and laughed at those who wanted "safe spaces" and overly sensitive, are overly sensitive about people not like them getting any help. "You called us snowflakes, but you're the ones who have the fragile ego."
I submitted it, then did a search for the domain. Noticed that there was discussion on a previous submission, thought that was worth pointing out. ChrisArchitect is pretty good at this, but sometimes I do it myself.
Do yourself a favor and search “Agent Orange” on your preferred search engine (Sidenote: I’m trying to avoid using “Google” as a verb). Most people associate that term with the very harmful Vietnam-era herbicide, not the band. The band name may be a reference to the herbicide?
I can understand taking his word for it, but I don't personally believe that. How could someone in 1979 not have heard of Agent Orange? It would have been all over the news: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/19/archives/vietnam-veterans... and the Vietnam war was still fresh in everyone's mind. Maybe he was embarrassed by the edgy name, which is basically a reference to an American war crime, in later years? idk.
Grace Brewster Hopper (née Murray; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral.[1] She was a pioneer of computer programming. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and used this theory to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language, which was a major influence on COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. She was also one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer. She is credited with writing the first computer manual, "A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator", and is often credited with creating the first compiler.
didn't find anything controversial about her in wikipedia
I believe they posted "often credited with creating the first compiler", which is still true in this case. Interesting choice of a counter-example for a few reasons, though.
The conference was something else. It was a mix of recruiting, networking, and speakers. It had become really expensive and had some problems in recent years.
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)
What scares me for the future of my children is that people cheer or blend in, hide, give up. All this repression is helped from multitude of directions, actively or passively, but helped. And the intentional confrontation, seeking it, is increasingly the norm while standing up for it, the protective confrontation is disappearing into the shades, under the grass, not to be seen, go dormant or in some instances, die. This will not end well.
What does discrimination against men look like and what are the impacts on men when programs try to manage structural misogyny but end up w something else? I feel like a lot of men feel they are being discriminated against (even young boys in 1st and second grade say they girls get preferential treatment even when it’s clear they are the ones being disruptive), so my question is…where is this feeling coming from? (I’m not a man so I dont get it)
Who does AnitaB.org actually support or advocate for?
Their "Our Mission" page refers only to the perfectly vague "our community", never once describing what that is. Nor does their landing page. Their "Our History" page says that the organisation started out to support women in the tech industry, but then describes several name changes, eventually dropping all use of the words "woman" or "women" and switching to the user of "individuals" without explanation or elaboration. It reads like a perfectly choreographed PR "product" designed to maximise deniability of... something. But what?
Grace Hopper may not be a casualty of the DEI backlash alone. It may also be a casualty of a hiring market that no longer needs large-scale recruiting events.
You clearly do not work in Tech. Grace Hopper has been around for decades, and companies have understood how important it is for furthering their industries.
This is absolutely the US Gov to blame for its DEI attacks and threats.
This was true 10 years ago, today not so much. After several years of cultural revolution, recent crimes, discrimination lawsuits, the entire "women in tech" subject is toxic.
Now it is in implosion phase, where activists will start eating their own (just see the hit list OP published).
Another problem is AI. Common coders will become obsolete (together with "women in tech"). There is no push for more "women in plumbing jobs". Pushing young people into tech (presumably with expensive student loans) is just cruel. Women are not stupid!
There are two links, and they were the first two I found in a 2 minute search, which you could, and should, have done yourself before forming the opinion that women as a whole are not pushing for trades jobs. It's pretty clear at this point that you formed the opinion first.
The first thing I think about when I hear GHC is the gaslighting. For years I was prodded about that I should go. Men are absolutely welcome. Everyone is welcome, etc.
I never felt that I was actually welcome. And I don't have to be. It's not for me, and it doesn't have to be. I answered women inviting me that no, that wasn't made for me, have fun though.
Then mass layoffs happened, and men who lost their jobs, or looking for their first job, went.
Suddenly everything flipped. Keynote was basically "what the fuck are all you men doing here, taking the space of women?".
There are no isolated phenomena. There are no accidents. It apples to everything. Times are changing. Priorities are changing. The party is coming to an end. People are getting real. It's like the world suddenly progressed past it's childhood or waking from a musical dream.
The courtesy smiles, the pretentive presentations, the sale talk, the polite social customs, the diplomacy, the power due to knowledge, weaponry, currency fixations, - all will face the concrete realities. Water recedes exposing the naked, boisterous economies. The zero-carbon evangelists run to Russia for diesel and to China for minerals or they get extinct, unable to adapt and sitting on their presumptive glory.
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.
For context, the first Grace Hopper Celebration was 1994, and had been held for the last 20 consecutive years. Long before DEI.
But when the powers that be are intent to kill off "DEI", and their definition includes anything related to women, this is what happens. Too many business cowards don't want to have problems with their merger, acquisition, IPO, FCC license, etc for supporting celebrating a great American like this, just because she was a woman.
There was definitely gender-based affirmative action benefitting women in 1994 - the term DEI is newer than that (as far as I'm aware), but the concept is definitely not.
According to the Wikipedia article on the event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper_Celebration_of_Wo...), "In 1994, Anita Borg and Telle Whitney founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. With the initial idea of creating a conference by and for women computer scientists, Borg and Whitney met over dinner, with a blank sheet of paper, having no idea how to start a conference, and started to plan out their vision. The first Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing was held in Washington, D.C., in June 1994, and brought together 500 technical women.".
Having a specific conference for women in computing is definitely a DEI concern; from the very beginning, the entire point of having a formal celebration of Grace Hopper was to be a locus for this female-specific conference. Grace Hopper's importance to this conference is that she was a woman, not that she invented FLOW-MATIC.
Grace Hopper graduated from Yale with a PhD in 1933. In 1952, Professor Bessie Lee Gambrill became the first woman at receive tenure at Yale.
Many women mathematicians in computer science worked in the field because they were denied a university career path because of their gender.
As an example of how late gender equality arrived, Olga Taussky-Todd (Caltech) held only a “research associate” title from 1957 until Caltech made her its first female full professor in 1971.
https://mathematics.caltech.edu/about/prizes-awards/olga-tau...
It is not wrong to celebrate a more enlightened world by highlighting its trailblazers and encouraging others to follow their footsteps in breaking barriers.
If I ever got famous, I would hope that people would remember me posthumously by what I did rather than by the fact that I was the "first Bangladeshi" to do whatever. You just mentioned two women professors at Yale and Caltech. I am sure they did amazing things. But your post just says they were women and contains no reference to their actual lives' work.
It is useful to study both their inventions and to learn about the history of discrimination against women. One doesn't make the other more or less valuable to understand. I was responding to a post about gender discrimination with examples.
Both are quite famous. Their work, and summaries of their work, are easily found if you are legitimately curious. Olga Taussky-Todd was a pioneer in matrices theory - certainly relevant and impactful in today's AI, LLM world. I see someone gave a separate synopsis of Admiral Grace Hopper's accomplishments.
Grace Hopper invented COBOL (or its direct predecessor anyway), did a lot of foundational work with compiler design, and generally (if you'll pardon the pun) led the deep integration of computer systems and programs into the military in the very early days. but yes, we should be focusing on what they've done, not just who they are.
What if you were the last Bangladeshi to achieve anything? How would that make you feel?
Grace Hopper gave us COBOL!
Why do you find it concerning that a conference would focus on women?
I don’t think they were expressing concern, just the fact.
I read it as a damning indictment against anti-“DEI” fanatics that they’re on the wrong side of history when they push the envelope too far in the direction of “merit-based hiring”, as if DEI was something relatively-recently concocted.
Laughably, in the days before “DEI”, “merit-based hiring” usually equated to “good old boys club”. Based on the industries in which I’ve been involved, it’s still very much “good old boys club”, despite best efforts for DEI to try to make things more merit-based.
That's exactly what merit based means. Look at the people picked by the current admin.
Nobody claims that political appointments are "merit based." They're by definition political. But university admissions and employment are supposed to be merit based, not political.
The person picking them does? We're told continuously how tremendously smart and wonderful they are.
He’s a carnival barker. That doesn’t change the fact that political appointments are political—they don’t have any relevance to merit-based admissions to universities or job hiring.
In fact, the distinction between political appointments and those other things is critical. In politics, you appoint people to reward your various constituencies. That’s just how politics works. But jobs and universities shouldn’t work that way.
Political jobs don't count as jobs so we just let any bozo be in charge of whatever. Got it.
> But university admissions and employment are supposed to be merit based, not political.
University admissions were not part of the DEI movement, they were part of the affirmative action movement. By conflating the two you’re unfairly grouping things of different types to tear them down together.
Huh? Someone saying something is a DEI concern does not mean they find it concerning.
"Having a specific conference for women in computing is definitely a DEI concern;"
The phrasing is ambiguous.
A specific conference celebrating women in a field they have been historically underrepresented in is exactly what DEI is about.
So for whom is this a concern? I am guessing for people who are anti-DEI?
Again, the phrasing does not make it very clear.
In "Having a specific conference for women in computing is definitely a DEI concern" I take concern to be the noun, Mirriam-Webster (1a) or (2) has something that relates or belongs to one : affair, from the context this would seem to be the definition that fits: DEI relates to such a conference, they're interested in it, rather than definition (1b) an uneasy state of blended interest, uncertainty, and apprehension which would lead to "concerning" but makes no sense in the context, as you note.
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“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” — Anatole France
Treating people equally does not mean treating them the same (or, why don't healthy people get to be hospital patients, too?).
Men have been getting gold stars for women's achievements for centuries. The discovery of DNA is a perfect example.
I thought the point was to improve the world and correct injustices, not just get revenge. Two wrongs don't make a right.
We are trying to correct injustices. What revenge seeking do you see?
It's hard for me to understand the sense of victimhood I sometimes see from other White men.
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> You're talking about a generation of white men who were told growing up that treating people differently based on skin color was the worst thing they could do.
There’s a linguistic sleight of hand that you’re using here that belies your emotional attachment to this topic.
It’s not that “treating people differently based on skin color” was the worst thing, it was that using skin color as a basis for discrimination, harassment, and even violence was the worst thing you could do.
You’re equating these two things:
… which I find laughably monstrous and points to a convenient ignorance of history> It’s not that “treating people differently based on skin color” was the worst thing, it was that using skin color as a basis for discrimination
Those are the same thing. "Discrimination" literally means "treating people differently based on skin color." Which is what the universities were doing.
> giving children who grew up in zip codes with terrible education outcomes a handicap during college admissions
That's not what universities were doing. We know that because they said so! In Harvard's brief to the Supreme Court, for example, Harvard argued that it had no "workable race-neutral alternative" that would achieve its goal of "diversity." Harvard.Br.52-53.
What you're describing--"giving children who grew up in zip code with terrible education outcomes a handicap"--is a race-neutral approach that focuses on socioeconomic factors. Harvard told the Supreme Court that such approaches would not work to achieve its goals: To achieve diversity targets without considering race, "Harvard would have to give socioeconomic tips of disproportionate magnitude ... so large that they would 'essentially automatically put[] in any applicant ... with an average probability of admission.'" Harvard.Br.53.
> What you're describing--"giving children who grew up in zip code with terrible education outcomes a handicap"--is a race-neutral approach that focuses on socioeconomic factors.
Well you also conveniently ignore that it would be an instant victim of Goodhart’s law. There are few, if any, race neutral approaches that can’t be gamed - and the only motivation for such approaches is to satisfy those who are so fervently against the idea of affirmative action. In fact, whenever such approaches are attempted, we see that the rich continue to game the system and the expense of the lower middle class (see Lori Laughlin), so it’s really just the stupid rich kids who benefit the most from “merit-based” admissions, not some humble, poor, but brilliant, child of the wrong race.
Did you go to school in the US? There’s absolutely no shortage of educational opportunities. I’m not sure why you’re arguing about Harvard. It impacts such a small percentage of the population. It’s also hilariously one of the institutions most mired by legacy admissions and admissions based on donations. Maybe use the California system instead?
Edit: also I’m not going to get in some autistic Twitter debate about what “discrimination” means. It’s convenient for those opposed to systems and regulations that benefit an oppressed people that anything not immaculately meritocratic can be described as “discriminatory”. Am I “discriminating” against my child Peter when I give his brother Paul a cookie because his other brother Pedro stole Paul’s cookie at lunch?
> There are few, if any, race neutral approaches that can’t be gamed
The race-conscious approaches are heavily gamed too. The minority students at elite universities are rarely people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Most often, they’re the children of affluent minorities, often elites from latin america or africa who have no connection to discrimination in the U.S.
Ironically, you’re engaged in some wild racial stereotyping by flipping back and forth between race and economic circumstances. Do you think there aren’t lots of affluent minorities in the U.S.? Harvard doesn’t let in poor minorities.
> the only motivation for such approaches is to satisfy those who are so fervently against the idea of affirmative action
Yes, institutions must satisfy those who are against grouping people together by race and treating them differently on that basis. That’s not only the law, but the law is correct.
> so it’s really just the stupid rich kids who benefit the most from “merit-based” admissions, not some humble, poor, but brilliant, child of the wrong race.
The evidence shows that the people who benefit the most from objective, merit-based admissions is smart lower-class kids of all races.
> There’s absolutely no shortage of educational opportunities.
That doesn’t justify grouping people based on race and treating them differently.
> I’m not sure why you’re arguing about Harvard. It impacts such a small percentage of the population.
Have you read any of the record in SFFA? Harvard just happened to be the headline name. Almost every institution does it. The medical school data I posted up thread is aggregated across all medical schools.
And elite institutions like Harvard are especially important because they’re gatekeepers. That’s how racial preferences jumped the air gap from universities to corporations. While universities had a carve out for affirmative action, employers never did. Race-conscious policies have always been illegal in the employment context (as the Supreme Court recently affirmed 9-0). But Ivy-educated people took those ideas from universities into the workplace and a bunch of Harvard-educated lawyers gave very bad advice.
> Am I “discriminating” against my child Peter when I give his brother Paul a cookie because his other brother Pedro stole Paul’s cookie at lunch
In this hypo, neither Paul nor Peter’s cookie was stolen. People aren’t reincarnations of their oppressed ancestors.
Everything about your argument hinges on your core take that "making decisions based on race" is fundamentally wrong, no matter the decision. Since I disagree with you on that, mostly on the basis that the world didn't pop into existence yesterday and I believe that we have a moral and ethical duty to make the best of the shit situation that we and our ancestors have created, there's really no purpose about arguing about stupid specifics on a point-by-point basis.
Especially since your arguments often contradict themselves and you transparently use specific details not because they are strong but because they are rhetorically useful (e.g. referring to "elite" institutions in the case of certain races being less likely to be admitted, but then referring to all institutions when speaking about whether merit-based admissions improve outcomes for lower income students). This is a form of gish-galloping.
Zip codes with terrible education outcomes are almost certainly proxies for zip codes with lots of black and hispanic students living in them. The fact that race correlates highly with zip code is why it is illegal under laws banning racial discrimination in financial services for banks and other loan-granting financial service companies to use zip code data as an input for computing the likelihood that a borrower will repay their loan. And if it's reasonable to legally ban moneylenders from looking at zip code data to determine likelihood of paying back a loan because it's a good proxy for race, it's reasonable to ban colleges from using it as a reason to give a handicap to college admissions for the same reason.
Centuries of discrimination against whole populations (women, non-whites) and I'm supposed to get bent out of shape that a university is preferring to admit people of those discriminated groups?
Given all the other advantages my male whiteness has benefited me, I think I can look past that.
(Not willfully blind, just keeping everything in perspective.)
> Centuries of discrimination against whole populations (women, non-whites) and I'm supposed to get bent out of shape that a university is preferring to admit people of those discriminated groups?
Yes, not because you’re white, but because as a citizen you have a moral obligation to help ensure that our institutions treat citizens as individuals, not as “groups.” Individuals living today shouldn’t be treated as if they personally suffered that discrimination by grouping them together based on skin color with people in the past who did. That doesn’t mean ignoring the effects of past discrimination. But those effects are baked into people’s individual circumstances and can be evaluated in those terms. Rich people should be treated alike morally and poor people should be treated alike morally regardless of the individual path dependency that led them both to the same place.
You can’t have your group identity cake and eat it too. I can’t demand better treatment than a similarly situated white person because other Bangladeshis are poor. I’m not them any more than you are them. Conversely, it’s wrong to discriminate against my wife’s poor white extended family members because other white people are rich. My kids go to private school with WASPs, some of whom definitely have slave owner legacy money. My wife’s family aren’t those people, and it’s racism to arbitrarily group them together.
He was talking about the opinion of other white men, not Bangladeshis angry on our behalf
Why is a Bangladeshi not capable of empathizing with and articulating how a white person would feel under given circumstances?
Don't confuse rational discourse for "victimhood". Finding reasoned discourse difficult to understand and centering it around "victimhood" is ironically an effeminate trait.
I wasn't specifically addressing the person I was replying to—speaking instead to the general victimhood I see on display when this topic comes up.
I've lost friends to the "man-o-sphere" that think women and minorities have it easy, it's the white male that is being persecuted.
Pathetic.
>I wasn't specifically addressing the person I was replying to—speaking instead to the general victimhood I see on display when this topic comes up.
Oh, so just whatever you feel like is happening you delusionally believe is happening. Not surprising.
>I've lost friends to the "man-o-sphere" that think women and minorities have it easy, it's the white male that is being persecuted.
I've lost friends to the "DEI-o-sphere" that think men and majorities have it easy, it's the non-white female that is being persecuted.
Pathetic.
Most conferences claim to be for everyone, but are really geared towards white cis men.
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It’s not really that simple. Read some of the accounts of the conference from recent years. The conference was falling apart even when companies were sponsoring it. I don’t know about last year’s conference but before that there were a lot of bad experiences and reports that it was turning into more of a job fair than tech conference, but even that wasn’t going well.
It was also getting very expensive. When a conference has a long list of sponsors and tickets also start at $600 minimum, it’s hard to keep that going in a year like this when everyone is dealing with large token spend budgets.
They likely could have survived with a right-sized event but they aimed higher than their budget allowed and hoped the money would appear at the last minute. It did not.
> It was also getting very expensive. When a conference has a long list of sponsors and tickets also start at $600 minimum
im in the conference business but just fyi thats actually cheap - venue, av and f&b alone cost many millions for a conference this size. a good rule of thumb on cost is $1-2000 per head depending on quality of event.
Isn't the problem here the Anita Borg foundation and not Grace Hopper?
> But when the powers that be are intent to kill off "DEI", and their definition includes anything related to women, this is what happens.
It's the other way around -- they want to do away with anything to do with women, and they used this DEI boogeyman to get everyone scared enough to go along with it.
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> Before we try to rehabilitate "DEI" let's not forget what it was and is: universities and employers grouping people together based on skin color and treating them differently based on it, by applying wildly different standards.
One of the major problems with "DEI" as used in the vernacular is that people have trouble agreeing on the meaning of the term.
This results in partisans inventing their own fantastical definitions of it, which they use as bogeymen to encourage misogyny or race baiting.
DEI practices I've witnessed at the companies I've worked at include:
* Creating separate interview pipelines for "diverse" candidates, with multiple chances to re-try failed interviews (Asian and white male applicants get one chance).
* Financial penalties when quotas on the basis of race and gender were not met. Of course, the company portrayed them as bonuses rewarded for reaching inclusion milestones, but ultimately a bonus and a penalty are indistinguishable.
* Designating separate headcount pools for women and URM hires.
What was even more concerning was that the people who were privately the biggest proponents of these practices would, like you, publicly condemn the idea that DEI involves discrimination as racist and misogynist.
The confusion is the point. People who want to have racial preferences in admissions and hiring can’t use the phrase “racial preferences,” because it’s always been unpopular. So they used the term “affirmative action” instead. But that also came to be understood as meaning racial preferences. So then they switched to “DEI.” Now they’re throwing that label under the bus too. I suspect within a few years we’ll have a different label.
What are the odds of a black applicant for CEO?
IME black corporate board members typically come from a military, law, or medical background. White board members have a much more diverse set of backgrounds, including "son of former board member".
It’s the same group of people running the companies and boards as are running Harvard and the medical schools.
So 2% African American and 11% female? (the current ratios of F500 CEOs for each identifier)
Or presumably ~85% white and male?
Your 85% white figure doesn’t tell you anything. Educated and liberal white people have an out-group preference, which is why universities and medical schools discriminate against white people despite being run by white people.
If educated and liberal white people have an out-group preference, why are African Americans and women underrepresented in CEO seats?
Or are you saying corporate boards are uneducated and conservative?
> Long before DEI.
This is simply not accurate. It is profoundly inaccurate
DEI didn’t implode. It stopped being a valuable marketing exercise for most companies as it wasn’t trending on social media any more.
It became a liability - corporates were legally threatened
This really didn't happen over here in Europe at all. That was mostly a US thing. Here it just faded out as it couldn't be leveraged.
At our place, it did not influence hiring decisions other than having a formal DEI position in the org which was disposed of almost immediately when it was seen as a cost and not a benefit.
Trump's threats were international and European businesses and media were very much talking about it at the time. Here's two examples from April 2025, the first is in Swedish:
* https://riks.se/nyheter/wallenberg%C3%A4gda-ericsson-tonar-n...
* https://swedenherald.com/article/ericsson-ceo-explains-dropp...
Here's one example.
Yeah it was wearing off by then anyway. So they got to blame it on Trump I think.
It just silently evaporated here during a "restructure".
What does "wearing off" mean and what evidence would you point to for that position?
I work in academia in Europe and, as I am a native English speaker, a longtime side gig is language revision of grant applications for other academics. I have worked with a hell of a lot of them in many fields of the humanities. A lot of grant-seekers were using American-inspired DEI language in their applications in the late 2010s and early 2020s, but this began to dwindle by late in Biden's term. I would agree with the claim made above that this particular rhetorical movement just ran out of steam as time passed and society quietly shifted, independent of Trump.
Source for _legally_ ?
(Legally as in, using the legal system)
DOJ sued Deloitte over DEI programs, they ended up settling for $21.5 million: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/deloitte-pay-215-mi...
Texas Attorney General declared DEI initiatives unconstitutional in a legal opinion: https://www.gibsondunn.com/texas-attorney-general-declares-p...
Several state Attorneys General sent legal threats to 20 major law firms over DEI: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/republican-led-states-deman...
Texas Attorney General warned major banks that DEI programs violate feduciary duty: https://today.westlaw.com/Document/Ibce2fdc5dcec11efb708bbad...
You can add IBM to the list. They paid a settlement for their practice of tying executive bonuses to quotas: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/ibm-pays-17-million-resolve-a...
There's a big difference between suing people for prima facie illegal hiring practices and suing people for holding Grace Hopper celebrations. We probably shouldn't conflate them. Your links, as best as I can tell, are about the former sort of activity - hiring or paying people differently on the basis of protected characteristics.
Probably, but corporations and assimilated organizations will not take the risk.
You understand that none of these companies believe the merits of why they are settling?
They are settling because, like the law firms Trump suborned, they didn't want the MAGA rage; especially in the case of Texas, where Trump may (correctly as it goes) think Paxton is a disgusting slug of a man, but still vocally supports him.
The legal system was just the venue. All of this is bullshit corporate spinelessness in the face of threats without merit, especially in firms like Deloitte, who do not want their M&A interfered with.
I don't understand why you're replying to me like that
> You understand that ...?
Yes I do
OK. That is fine. It was literally a question so as to work out if we were on the same page for what I wrote subsequently. I will make a mental note that the phrasing doesn't come across that way.
As an aside I think my brain jumped the track and had me thinking I was replying to another commenter I'd replied to already -- who wrote a sibling comment to yours.
My apologies.
No worries! :)
Don't know about corporates, but Harvard was sued[0] for DEI-esque discrimination.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
Harvard lost due to obvious "anti" racist discrimination. It still seems to discriminate against whites and asians and in favour of blacks, but not as heavily as it used to.
Edit: forgot to to write "and asians".
Every statement from company officials such as "we only employ women" or "toxic males", can be used as evidence at court. It is very difficult to prove bias from vague sanitized corporate language, direct "activist" statements make proving such bias very easy. For example recent lawsuit with IBM!
> "we only employ women"
But I highly doubt most companies were saying that or implying it. There's more to DEI than having minority quotas. Would DEI practices such as campaigns to encourage more men to go into nursing, midwifery or teaching be targeted too?
> such as campaigns to encourage more men to go into nursing, midwifery or teaching be targeted too?
These aren't illegal and have never been the problem.
Discriminational hiring practices and quotas are, unfortunately DEI activists decided to do these.
> These aren't illegal and have never been the problem.
This is being contested right now. And so, unless you enjoy getting sued, you won't do it.
Just because you agree with the current administration on certain topics, does not mean that you necessarily agree with them on all topics. This is a case of you projecting your opinion based on what your beliefs without checking whether reality matches.
But the administration is going after those same types of programs when they target women or minorities.
Minorities like men?
Some do I’m sure. I’m not sure what this has to do with the discussion.
Few companies said that they only employ women. That would be too overt.
But plenty of companies very publicly instituted policies to financially penalize their employees if they fail to meet gender quotas. Remember, a policy of giving a bonus when an "inclusion milestone" of X% women in technical roles is reached is fundamentally the same thing as instituting a penalty when that X% quota is missed.
Yeah there's a decent chance that DEI practices to do this violate neutrally-written US civil rights law, and also make women doing nursing or midwifery angry enough to use lawsuits in order to end these programs.
There's a case going through the courts for Red Hat right now where they based managerial bonuses on how diverse their teams were, which reportedly led to them pushing out white males.
Such should rightfully be illegal.
Companies couldn't hide their blatant racism and sexism behind DEI any longer. Corporates were legally threatened for violating Civil Rights laws.
While cynical, there is a lot of truth to your statement. I wish the activist type would realize that they are actually being used, but it appears there isn't much chance they will ever listen to the old dogs in this game.
That is exactly it. A good perspective: the activists were being used.
> seems like that didn’t help on funding and sponsors
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.
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.
Post is very clear there is also less interest from individuals to participate. Tech jobs are going through implosion now (for several reasons), and working in tech is not so attractive anymore.
> Unlike past events, this year, both individual registrations
Mainly because the people in power believe they'll be able to replace us all any day now.
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>It's a shame that events like this are affected, but I can't help but be glad that this ended...
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...
Or just canceling scientific research because keywords like "diversity" showed up in the abstract.
As a matter of fact non-white, non-male individuals are disadvantaged in many societies. The consequences of improving the equality of opportunities may sometimes feel like disadvantage to groups that received preferential treatment before. The goal needs to be a levelled playing field for everyone, not denying inequality and punishing those who point out and strive to improve those social injustices.
Collective punishment or priviledges baced on race or sex is ... racism/sexism, pure and simple. If you want to help disadvantaged people then help those who are disadvantaged. But that's harder and generally requires you to actually show that they are disadvantaged rather than making racist/sexist claims.
Or just help everyone and not worry about means testing. It won't be hard to spot the ones taking more than their fair share.
Real equality isn't obtainable. What we are doing currently is just moving things around. The classic case of the vocal minority being louder then another minority. This isn't creating honest fairness, it just highlights certain groups to the detriment of others. Since LGBTQ has become louder, disabled people are being more forgotten again. Accessibility is HARD, so, just cater to LGBTQ and your corporate conscience is magically cleared up. Activists HATE this insight, since they are also blind to the needs of even smaller groups. I know what I am talking about, I am disabled, and I am watching the "landscape" since 35 years.
If your knee jerk reaction is to downvote this, I am not surprised, because, you know, that just underlines my point.
It's almost like capitalism is inherently unequal.
Is a bit like with democracy. Its the best system we have... Everything we, as humans, do, will eventually be unfair, because, frankly, humans are just not fair. Sure, a select few have high goals, and might even DTRT... But thats always just a small group. The rest of us will try to take advantage of others, some coniscously, some unconsciously. Humankind will only be fair once it has ended.
I don't see how you could conclude that capitalism is the best system when it is the only one the west has tried since the end of feudalism. I think there is still plenty of progress to be made and capitalism creates more negative incentives than anything positive.
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This is just my subjective experience, but the only people I've ever seen complain about "DEI" in real life were the most incompetent men I've ever met. These people were clearly aware, on some level, that "DEI" is a threat to them specifically.
We had a physical laborer position in the datacenter (lift and shift) get "flagged for diversity (female)" and sit open and unfilled for a year because we were unable to recruit a woman. THIS is the kind of thing that causes problems: some HR analyst pulled the datacenter team stats, saw there were no women working in the grunt team, and decided to try and change that by force. We had LOTS of women in the datacenter group, majority in analysts and coordination, pretty balanced overall, but just none in the grunts. No thoughts were given to why women didn't and likely wouldn't apply for that role. By god, I tried. The few I got to interview noped out once the job responsibilities were made clear. We eventually closed the position unfilled as part of a scaledown/budget giveback.
I'm sure an argument could be made about how the org should seek equity by restructuring the way the team works to eliminate the need for physical strength and replace it with machines, allowing any operative to do the job, but those arguments never seem to come with a budget attached to buy lifts or powered carts to allow us to change the way things have been done in the computing center for 50+ years. Talk is cheap, companies are cheaper. Furthermore, overcoming societal norms such that a woman would choose to apply for that role over a less physically taxing, traditionally male-coded one is likely to be more difficult even than finding budget for machines.
That's just your company's HR being morons. Or more likely, they were doing their best to make sure the position didn't get filled because that would cost money.
My point was that HR "just being morons" adds fuel to the fire for people pushing anti-diversity narratives. It feels stupid, because it is stupid. It came from a good place (stop shutting women out of jobs) and devolved into the typical corporate "GMD says we have to increase diversity by 10% this year" metric-chasing bureaucratic crapola. It's not even the only similar instance in my career, but I won't be doxxing myself further.
Yeah, that's a corporate problem, not a DEI problem. I agree it lends credence to the anti-DEI arguments, but that is due to those people's exiting narrow mindedness and all or nothing thinking.
This is just my subjective experience, but the only people I've ever seen complain about "anti-DEI" in real life were the most incompetent women I've ever met. These people were clearly aware, on some level, that "anti-DEI" is a threat to them specifically.
The fact that you couldn't muster an actual response but just plagiarized my comment adds another data point to my experience.
That was my response.
The fact that you couldn't muster an actual response but just complained about the plagerization of your comment adds another data point to my experience.
"The fact that you couldn't muster an actual response"
I did.
What is the purpose of your behavior? Do you think this will change anyone's opinions? Are you just trying to bait me? Are you angry and using this as an outlet?
Because responding in this childish way, parrotting everything I say, just supports my original point. If your intent was to get people to reconsider their opinion of people like you, you're failing. You just make yourself look bad.
So what is the purpose? Wasting people's time? Making them angry at you? To what end?
>I did.
So did I.
What is the purpose of your behavior? Do you think this will change anyone's opinions? Are you just trying to bait me? Are you angry and using this as an outlet?
Because responding in this childish way, bitching over everything I post, just supports my original point. If your intent was to get people to reconsider their opinion of people like you, you're failing. You just make yourself look bad.
So what is the purpose? Wasting people's time? Making them angry at you? To what end?
This is just my subjective experience, but the only people I've ever seen complain about "anti-DEI" in real life were the most incompetent women I've ever met. These people were clearly aware, on some level, that "anti-DEI" is a threat to them specifically.
> If your intent was to get people to reconsider their opinion of people like you
It wasn't. I was commiserating with someone who already shared my opinion, and then you responded.
DEI would be less of a threat to you if you made yourself less unpleasant.
Just at the administration and say with a straight face that it's meritocracy in action. Hah.
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DEI imploded because it's racist and sexist and always was.
Tell me how Hegseth and Patel are remotely qualified for their positions.
Whataboutism.
Your post would be way less hilarious if you refrained from using words like "bitches" in a post arguing for DEI! Derogatory sexist terms don't really help your cuase.
Clearly a Fox host is the best military super genius.
The federal government has cancelled funding for a ton of genuinely useful scientific research because "o noes not the DEI monster". (Not to mention just putting the word "diversity" in your proposal has been grounds for rejection, even if it you're talking about, say "wifi antenna diversity".)
But sure, I'm glad now you can say whatever you want in your code comments. Seems like a good trade. /s
Overcorrection is only a natural reaction to a previously even larger push in the other direction. The correction was sorely needed and wel'll just have to live with a little bit of collateral damage until things normalize.
That is idiotic and stems from the false notion that there is some natural equilibrium that will occur.
Profiles of corporate courage...
To Godwin it (with his assumed blessing (1)), I guess this is how BMW, Hugo Boss, Allianz, etc, ended up being involved in the Holocaust.
(1) https://www.alternet.org/godwins-law-trump-hitler/
Reducing funding for something sometimes harmful, which then correspondingly means the funding is not passed on to others, is not the Holocaust.
The utter degrading of the meanings of powerful words might get us there, though.
> is not the Holocaust
Hitler and Nazi Germany did not start with the Holocaust. It was instead the end result. Something can be compared to Hitler or compared to the Nazis or their rhetoric without being literally the Holocaust.
Keep in mind that Hitler and the Nazis took power starting in 1933 but forcing jews to carry identification (i.e. add israel or sara to non-jewish names and add jewish identification marks to paperwork) didn't start until mid-to-late 1938 with Kristallnacht following only months later in Nov 1938.
But in that early period however Nazis began
- gutting research institution
- literally destroying research institutions and research. (ex the famous 1933 book burning picture was from the demolition of the Institute for Sexual Research which studied gender non conformity, intersex traits, and broader topics in the LGBTQIA academic space. Also was where the first transgender sex reassignment surgery took place.)
- expelling academics
- dismantling social programs
- pressuring companies into aligning with state ideological and industrial objectives
- seizing control of, attacking, or privatising domestic and foreign media
- pressuring domestic and foreign entertainment into aligning with Nazi ideological stances
- punishing, oppressing, and expelling political and cultural enemies of the party from the military and civic institutions.
- converting prisons into work camps.
- building out detention facilities/prisons for "illegals" with deplorable conditions with intent to make them suffer as long as possible. These would later become concentration camps and then death camps once crowding became too extreme. And notably this began with the romani population in the early 1930s who Nazis believed to be criminals illegally present within the country.
--------------------
Nazi germany was so much more than just the Holocaust and genocide of the Jewish people. They were part of it however they were the conclusion not the start.
> Reducing funding for something sometimes harmful, which then correspondingly means the funding is not passed on to others, is not the Holocaust.
This is a rather boring straw man characterisation of the claim you are replying to. Don’t do this.
It might be a good idea to mention what the straw man is, rather than just throw the phrase and see if it sticks.
The straw man is obvious and you are being disingenuous. The comment you are replying did not at all imply that "[r]educing funding for something sometimes harmful" was a crime on the same level as the Holocaust, or any such thing. It is you making that assertion; your straw man.
It is very obvious, surely, that the comment was a dark, sardonic point about the tendency for "anticipatory obedience" in the Trump era (calling AI "superintelligence" etc).
That is to say, stopping doing something fully legal and uncontroversial out of the fear of reprisals that are ultimately the result of a government (the Trump administration) acting beyond their bounds; there is no reason at all for companies to stop their DEI initiatives when Trump's power is limited to federal institutions, and there is even less reason for them to withdraw sponsorship.
Anticipatory obedience absolutely is part of why major German (and US) firms ended up complicit in the Holocaust.
Companies engaging in anticipatory obedience, taking away programs that are still addressing inequality of opportunity, are on that slippery slope. The last couple of years have made it easier to understand how companies get captured by extremism and illegality.
(Law firms especially; Trump has broken, humiliated, defanged and belittled law firms who took on merit-based cases against him and that is part of why corporations are backing out of DEI initiatives; their law firms cannot be counted on to argue for them)
It doesn’t say anyone pulled out at the last minute.
I think we’re trying to put on a very big conference and hoping that big sponsors would come through at the last minute to make the numbers work.
They’ve had some problems in the recent years. It even made NPR headlines for cops having to show up. Everyone who hasn’t heard of the conference until now is assuming the sponsors are entirely to blame but the conference was not doing well for a couple years.
yeah, feels like they were hoping something would come through until it didn't
Most US companies. The rest of the world happily doesn't care - and increasingly doesn't do so solely to avoid looking like United Statesmen.
>The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this
Oh but they were about this. This is the common trend of people thinking that "the good ones" are implicitly exempted from their general and sweeping attacks on $THING. C.f. the hardline anti-immigration voter who thinks that the guy who mows their lawn obviously won't be included in the crackdowns. If you attack the whole concept of DEI (as many did – not necessarily you), then you are in fact attacking events celebrating the achievements of women in fields where they're poorly represented.
>C.f. the hardline anti-immigration voter who thinks that the guy who mows their lawn obviously won't be included in the crackdowns.
huh, that's pretty bizarre, at least here in Australia (where in recent years immigration has exploded to 2x ~ 3x that of the USA), all the anti-immigration voters are sincerely hoping the guy who mows their lawn grew up across town where his wife's sister now lives.
the crackdowns are for the economic migrants just taking a lifestyle arbitrage
ultimately, immigration into large developed nations is an act of altruism, which, like most things in life, cannot scale indefinitely (much to the chagrin of business owners, women, arts students, etc.) - which is not nice, but is true.
A hardline anti-immigration voter is probably less likely to employ a likely-illegal-immigrant guy to mow their lawn than someone who is pro-immigration.
Similarly, someone who has actually attended the Grace Hopper conference is more likely to be pro-DEI than someone who has never attended and doesn't care about it happening.
I don't see how these probability claims are relevant. To avoid going off on a tangent, let's leave my immigration analogy out of this.
My basic point was that when people attack DEI in general, they create an environment that's more hostile to a conference like this one. They may say "oh, but obviously I wasn't talking about things like that". However, words have meaning. If you attack DEI as such then you attack all instances of it – not just the ones that happen to irk you.
This point has nothing to do with the likely views of the people attending the Grace Hopper Celebration.
> My basic point was that when people attack DEI in general, they create an environment that's more hostile to a conference like this one. They may say "oh, but obviously I wasn't talking about things like that". However, words have meaning. If you attack DEI as such then you attack all instances of it – not just the ones that happen to irk you.
That's one possible response; another possible response is "I've never heard of the Grace Hopper conference, but now that I have heard of it, I was definitely talking about things like that when I attacked DEI in general, I'm glad the people running it aren't getting funding anymore".
My own position as someone who was previously aware of the Grace Hopper conference (I know women who have attended in the past) is that I don't have a problem in principle with celebrating Grace Hopper or even with people of arbitrary demographic groups, such as women, self-organizing to do a thing for themselves; but I did view it as a women-in-tech-specific conference that I would not have attended or sought to attend because I am not a woman. I wouldn't have donated my own money to it, and I'm not particularly upset if the reason they're canceling it now is because they can't find corporate sponsors. Certainly I'm not gonna change my mind about opposing DEI programs on the grounds that it affects corporate willingness to sponsor a particular women-in-tech conference.
Sorry, but you’re just losing track of the thread of discussion here. I was responding to someone who said:
> The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this, and thus it would appear this may be collateral damage.
You don’t see this as collateral damage, but the person I was responding to does.
> The controversies and scandals surrounding DEI were not about this, and thus it would appear this may be collateral damage.
This is not the case at all. There have been ample people complaining about this stuff for years. While there are some people who are upset at various policies for other reasons there really is a battery of people who just genuinely don't want to see minority representation in the workplace. Oftentimes these people dress up their true complaints in softer ones but you really can see people like Chris Rufo pushing for a world where minorities are not in positions of power or authority.
I have personally observed people at my workplace (Google) complaining about any funded attendance at Grace Hopper as discrimination against men.
> 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.
That GHC has had a lot of problems in the past several years. The ticket prices were getting excessive and the conference itself was wandering off course.
Even the current website looks like something that would be hard to justify under most conference travel budget requests: It’s hard to find the actually technical content among the speakers, even though they’re claiming 700+ speakers.
Some of the top selling points are finding employers who are hiring and growing your network. Most companies have tightened up their conference budgets to focus on educational material, not events focus on recruiting people to other companies. Everyone knows conferences will have companies recruiting, but when recruiting is one of the primary selling points it’s more job fair than conference.
The conference has also been problematic on many levels in the past few years. It made news headlines in 2023 for conflict about too many men showing up and arguments about whether or not they were really transgender. The police have been called. They’ve been flirting with political ideologies like Thiel-associated key speakers trying to make the theme of the event encouraging young women to drop out of college. The operations have been a mess from a lot of the reports.
Everyone in these comments is assuming anti-DEI, but everything I heard about the conference was a growing dumpster fire and cash grab for years. I think they finally collapsed when they tried to grow too big after years of bad experiences for their sponsors combined with companies facing increasing AI spend who weren’t interested in spending thousands of dollars to send employees to a conference where recruiting to other jobs was one of the main selling points.
> This always seemed like a good event and only ever heard positive things about it.
Shocking.
This had nothing to do with DEI.
It has everything to do with something we're not allowed to criticize.
DEI didn’t implode; it’s not an implosion when it’s shot at from the outside by malicious actors intent on destroying something they don’t understand and can only kneejerk react to out of unreasoning fear.
This isn’t collateral, this was the plan, the planners were just too stupid to see the natural consequences of their plan. See also the price of diesel.
It was definitely and constantly imploding. It was just kept alive by a giant amount of taxpayer and corporate money.
What does this even mean? Every initiative is kept alive by money. It was very clearly attacked by the Trump administration, and once they started attacking, DEI initiatives stopped. Why else do you think the "implosions", apparently happening all the time, were finally too much to sustain around 2025?
> Why else do you think the "implosions"
Namely by going too far and breaking the law by becoming discriminatory? So now companies are not going to touch DEI.
DEI killed DEI, not Trump.
When did DEI go too far, and why? I am not aware of any anti-DEI position that thinks it was ever an acceptable practice. It has been resisted since the 80s.
Seems like there is obviously a spectrum of positions here and various people have found themselves calling certain positions "DEI" or "anti-DEI" or "affirmative action" or "racist" depending on which positions they hold and where a particular institution lies on it. For example:
1. A company that hires mainly based on on-paper qualifications (which, due to existing disparities in experience and education, means in practice that they hire fewer historically disadvantaged minorities)
2. A company that, believing that talent or merit is more equitably distributed among groups than on-paper qualifications may suggest, goes out of their way to interview a greater proportion of historically disadvantaged minority groups than necessarily would naturally apply to their positions (to discover those as-of-yet-unrecognized talents), and tries to hire based on actual merit and ability rather than on-paper qualifications.
3. A company that has the goal of creating a more equitable and diverse workforce with groups that more closely matches their proportions of the population. They spend a lot of time and effort actively recruiting and seeking out employees from underrepresented minority groups, meaning that it is effectively easier for minority groups to get interviews at this company for this position, but still tries to hire based on actual ability and talent once they get to the interview stage
4. A company which, accounting for the disparities in distribution of measurable abilities of groups, tries to hire based on within-group ability rather than between-group ability; for example trying to hire the top 10th percentile of black, or top 10th percentile asian, or top 10th percentile male, rather than top 10th percentile of all applicants in aggregate (which would likely be overrepresented by over-performing groups). This in practice means using a different standard for different groups, but using the within group distribution of talent; they may say they are "considering race/sex/disability as one of many factors they take into account"
5. A company that in practice has an explicit hiring quota based on the race/sex/etc. of applicants, in order to create a more equitable or diverse workforce that matches the relative sizes of those groups in the local population.
6. A company that, in order to reverse historical and current disparities in achievement within society, actively discriminates in the opposite direction as historical trend, with the goal of evening the playing field more quickly.
7. A company that, in order to address historical grievances and grant some amount of justice to victims of discrimination and oppression, actively and purposefully discriminates against privileged majority and overachieving groups, favoring underprivileged and underachieving groups, up to and including reparations for past injustices to remedy current disparities.
I'm pretty sure 1-3 are legal and 4-7 are illegal, but I'm not a lawyer so that's just my guess. Some hardliners might attack 2 as going too far, but somewhere between 3 and 4 is probably the more common point at which anti-DEI people draw their line.
The history is more than a little complicated. I model it as a set of separate overton windows in different institutions that have shifted, widened, and contracted over the last 60 or so years. So in this picture, courts arguably expanded it to 4-6 in the 80s, but have retreated back to around 2-3 since then. Legislature has mostly stayed around 2-3 with a handful of radicals pushing higher or lower with low-to-moderate success. Academia has been around 5-7 since the 70s. Executive has mostly hovered around 3-5 until Trump. Media/popular culture, big shift up to 6-7 in 2014-2021, retreating back to 3-4 now. Also, motte-and-baileys are common here; pro-DEI activists sometimes frame it as something like 2, but often advocate up to 6 or 7 (e.g. "antiracism" in the 2020s peak). anti-DEI activists often say they simply oppose quotas and illegal discrimination (4-7), but in practice sometimes attack even 2-3 as being too much.
2 and 3 are also likely illegal.
> They spend a lot of time and effort actively recruiting and seeking out employees from underrepresented minority groups, meaning that it is effectively easier for minority groups to get interviews at this company for this position, but still tries to hire based on actual ability and talent once they get to the interview stage
Discriminating against candidates on the basis of protected class at the application review stage is no less illegal than discriminating during interviews.
#2 may or many not be illegal, depending what you mean by, "goes out of their way to interview a greater proportion of historically disadvantaged minority groups than necessarily would naturally apply to their positions." If this involves using protected class as a factor, in any way, on which candidates to advance to interviews, then yes it is illegal discrimination.
part of the issue is that there are multiple laws and legal frameworks even at the federal level in the US that are kind of contradictory here. See "disparate impact" law, where using a neutral standard (such as a background check, or an ability test) that affects different protected groups differently can be considered illegal discrimination. 2 might be illegal, but 1 might be illegal too in the other direction! It kind of seems like the only solution is to basically maintain plausible deniability and try your hardest not to leave an auditable paper trail about any of the reasoning you use to hire a candidate or not.
Fear of disparate impact claims do not justify discrimination on the basis of protect class. This was argued all the way up to the Supreme Court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricci_v._DeStefano
Furthermore, disparate impact theory has been largely rolled back in recent years.
The Sheetz disparate impact case was in 2024, post Ricci. Griggs is still the law of the land even though some justices have signaled they might want to revisit it.
I'm referring to the 2025 executive orders that instructed the EEOC not to employ disparate impact theory: https://apnews.com/article/discrimination-trump-civil-rights...
Ahh, the imaginary butthurt of those for whom “discrimination” has only ever been a shorthand for “having to compete on a level playing field”.
Trump (and his ilk) presented a straw man to the dumb, then shot the straw man, without ever thinking of the innocent people standing down range of their target, which included the dumb the whole time.
The same administration who, just yesterday hired a new press secretary who was very obviously not hired for qualifications but instead for being a blonde.
0.45 Scaramuccis
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DEI did not implode; it was heavily and viciously assaulted.
The implication here that the DEI movement had done nothing wrong is rather naive… it wasn’t all bad, but there was a lot of bad things happening to answer for.
I didn't see anyone but you suggest that.
Doesn't seem like that's implied at all. There is no implication about whether it is good or bad actually, but if the fact it was attacked is a bad thing, the only inference is that on balance it did more harm than good.
Could you elaborate on some of these "bad things"?
Many DEI programs were highly discriminatory if not outright racist towards certain minorities that were seen as less worthy. Asians and Jewish individuals were often heavily discriminated against via DEI initiatives. The list goes on.
These programs were, in theory, well intentioned but to suggest they did nothing wrong is simply factually incorrect.
The true motivations of the anti-DEI movement were obvious when they attacked DEI as a concept rather than just the corruption they claimed existed within the system, and proceeded to do things like blame plane crashes on the hiring of black pilots. There were already laws on the books against hiring discrimination.
Maybe a few naive people in the movement had good intentions but they were clearly dupes for what was at its core a right-wing white supremacist and incel ideology.
And the proof is in the pudding. Has the anti-DEI movment (and current administration) created a truly fair and equitable society that focuses on merit in the absence of gender and race? No. It has created a society in which the contributions of anyone other than white men are systemically attacked, torn down and even erased from the public record.
> they attacked DEI as a concept rather than just the corruption they claimed existed
People who crusade against DEI generally think that the concept is corruption, rather than being an unrelated side matter.
> There were already laws on the books against hiring discrimination.
Those are exactly the laws being used to attack DEI practices, though they were by consensus not previously wielded against clear violations that were intended virtuously.
>Has the anti-DEI movment (and current administration) created a truly fair and equitable society that focuses on merit in the absence of gender and race? No.
Has the DEI movment (and previous administration) created a truly fair and equitable society that focuses on merit in the absence of gender and race? No.
>It has created a society in which the contributions of anyone other than white men are systemically attacked, torn down and even erased from the public record.
It has created a society in which the contributions of anyone other than white men are systemically exalted, praised and even defended from the public record.
Jason Arday.
Racism
You could also say that DEI is easier to defend when human work was more valuable and capital was cheaper.
You could say that it was easier to practice before the executive (that routinely hires the dumbest troglodytes - whose only qualification is loyalty to the fuhrer - into positions of power) started a witchhunt against anyone practicing it.
Since the only god our corporatations worship goes by power and money, they all started tripping over themselves to kiss the ring.
I should be the last one to defend the existing system.
But IMHO DEI answers the wrong question.
Worthwhile lives does not come from equal access to the hamster wheel.
I am much more pro UBI structures og negative taxation - which are inherently difficult to make descriminatory as there is no personal judgement of the people to receive it.
You probably don't actually want corporations that do intrinsically care about being able to violate federal civil rights and anti-discrimination law, and are willing to lose money and give up influence in order to keep doing so.
My friend, as soon as the felon-in-chief started flexing his muscles, half of them suddenly announced that they wouldn't even support a fucking pride parade. Engagement between '24 and '25 dropped like a meteor.
(Showing up to one, or writing a check to one, is as far as I or anyone else on this planet is aware, is not in violation of any law, as much as MAGA would like it to be.)
There's no need to whitewash or come up with excuses for their cowardice.
As should all things evil be.
Oh my goodness. DEI, what a time it was!
When Jim Whitehurst left Red Hat, he was replaced by Paul Cormier, a complete wokee. Cormier got DEI fever and put in place a big corporate framework, led by a newly crowned VP, complete with staff.
DEI affinity groups were established, by ancestry, sexual orientation, veteran status, physical ability, neurodivergence, etc. The groups got t shirts and air time on company calls. Chatter on internal mailing lists shot upwards, often becoming political firestorms.
CEO Cormier got even crazier and started saying things about maybe not belonging at Red Hat if you didn’t buy into the complete DEI koolaid. The entire corporate leadership was using pronouns in email by then.
I was a member of the military veterans DEI group. I appreciated the t shirts and once got a backpack from a contest. It wasn’t all bad.
Some of it was overreach, and it grated on some people. But there was a glorious counter move in the works.
There was a Jewish guy that didn’t like having DEI thrust upon the company. Assessing his pool of allies, he started some quiet conversations and soon applied for a new DEI subgroup, “Jews and Judeo-Christian values”. The corporate DEI sponsors were caught off guard and approved of the group. I got to go to a DEI conference in Alabama on the company dime, a week long kumbaya fest with nice eats at a snazzy resort. Company funding was good!
A checkpoint on where Red Hat was at the time: the lead spokesperson for the Red Hat Women’s group was a muscular transgender person. That didn’t seem crazy in the context.
As the J&JCV group, we got air time and were able to give voice to our preferred messaging. Our ranks included a gay guy that was drummed out of the LGBT group for his airing of occasional conservative viewpoints. He was as welcome in our community as anyone.
Finally, the DEI leadership took a closer look and decommissioned our J&JCV subgroup. We tried to argue and appeal, and I believe we won the battle of logical arguments, but that was of no consequence. We lost our seat at the table.
It may have seemed bleak, but the winds of change were blowing. CEO Cormier was removed by IBM, after very little time in office.
Organic actions were wearing away at DEI, also. A prominent subgroup leader was taking lengthy ‘mental health breaks’ of week long duration— then boasting about it on mailing lists and encouraging others to do the same! Such things are not sustainable.
As I retired a few years later, DEI was operating at a reasonable level. Minority communities ( notably the excellent and long running Black Red Hatters group ) were bringing appropriate, positive messaging and were demonstrating the true power of diversity. Women’s groups were doing a good job of showcasing women in Tech, etc. I don’t remember anything truly crazy in my last year.
I believe things are going to be fine.
Interesting perspective that doesn't blame the downfall of DEI initiatives, or reluctance to travel to the US: https://www.reddit.com/r/womenintech/comments/1x4kilp/commen...
It sounds like this conference had been going downhill for a few years.
Is it because international registrations were down. I know that I am dodging US travel ATM
I've had the option of a free trip to the US twice in the past year.
I've rejected both due toy sentiment right now.
I'm lucky enough to have received one of Grace' nanosecond wires, when .. as a fresh young squib .. I attended one of her lectures and got one handed to me by the Admiral herself.
She was a huge influence on me - as a white male tech nerd - and I have long had a huge interest in women in tech, from Grace to Margaret Hamilton to Jeri Ellsworth and Anouk Wipprecht and more. Jeri's demonstration of her self-made transistors and work rebuilding a tunneling electron microscope were fascinating and rank among the most entertaining things I've seen in a hackerspace this century. Anouks' mad fashiontech excursions are positively exciting. There are many other women technologists who deserve our interest.
So its pretty unfortunate that GCH won't happen this year. I hope there are budding young squibs out there who won't see this as de-motivating with regards to their entry into the technology worlds.
Ugh. A bunch of our students already booked travel and rooms. What a horrible situation all around.
What's stopping those students from holding an impromptu memorial?
Most students are probably on trips paid for by others. Many of those groups would probably not be keen to fund an itinerary-free trip to Irvine California for a few days. Even if the students were purported to want to impromptu organize.
Nothing, but the Grace Hopper Celebration wasn't primarily about memorializing Grace Hopper.
Organizing
were there any hints that this might happen at all? so abrupt
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.
Incredible.
We faculty learned about it this evening. :(
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.
Lets not forget about female CEOs, they should be making 20x more.
Path dependence causes problems, it's better to make sure you can just use current state instead.
Sorry to be dense. What does that mean?
I believe the meaning in plain English 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.
Got it. I agree. If there is no modern negative consequences then no redress is needed.
and conversely, if there are modern negative consequences, let's focus on those and fix them!
100%
Look at the current admin's overt tipping of the scales for white heterosexual Christian (in name only) males to see evidence of DEI in action.
They just don't like it when it's other people
Yeah it's horrible and blatant.
But they think they can do it because they can spin it as "you did it first".
This just makes the point that there is nothing to gain by framing the issue as a grievance.
There are real prejudices and real systemic disadvantages to fix and while it's important to understand the history of them, I believe we put too much focus on that and less on what we can do to put that past behind us instead of dwelling in it. I don't think this approach of grievances has done anybody any favour in practice.
> But they think they can do it because they can spin it as "you did it first".
They are happy to do whatever they want, and they don't worry about needing false-equivalence precedent to do it.
sure, but this still doesn't mean we should behave like them.
“Snowflake” used to be a pejorative to describe the political left…
> “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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
OK. The framing has shifted, though.
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")
> centrism
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 (internally, with respect to general electoral processes)
> it would call for a careful analysis of how institutionalism dominates reform
Why? Status quo is the default in any state.
[sorry. Let's do this "Socratic" dialogue well]
Institutional reforms seem to go through better if done proactively. Eg, Sweden, 1990s, preempted China shock. What gave? Had the right people been voted in (at various levels)? Was there a culture of running parallel optimisations (org-Darwinist take) of status quo ante?
You might be able to apply those to how Swiss institutional-reforms (if any) preempted China shock
(or, now, how they are handling vs just avoidinh "migrant shock", orthogonally to the "resilient" demographic, popular framings, etc)
(What stuff is happening to the center left in Sweden right now?)
Sweden has bloc politics, i.e. no single party has the majority to govern.
The red-green bloc (left, center and greens) won a majority but the center party is playing kingmaker and refusing to let the left party into government. The left party has said from well before the election that they, reasonably, will not vote to support a government which they are not part of.
This has been due to decades of bourgeois / social democrat rat-fucking on policies, most notably disability / sick insurance reforms, after they got the left party's support votes. [1]
There is speculation that the center party would instead support the prior right wing government instead (voting with the extreme-right) - as long as the extreme right stays out of government, despite the extreme right getting all of their policies pushed through anyway. Even going so far as to withhold key votes in parliament until their immigration reforms (removing permanent residency and restricting citizenship, in this case) got passed. [2]
The short of it is that "centrist" parties are just right wing parties in disguise, in that they NEVER support leftist reforms but will happily support the right when it suits upper class economic interests.
Democracy being what it is, can be messy and nobody goes home happy. But the left of the left bloc saw the largest electoral gains in this election, so a move to the left is arguably what a growing portion of the electorate wanted. It was still a very close election, so you could frame it in many ways, but that the green-reds did see the biggest gains is fact.
1. https://arbetet.se/2026/09/21/sjukforsakringen-forklarar-var...
2. https://www.thelocal.se/20261012/beer-strike-and-contract-br...
You make it sound like the center party is playing both sides but as I understand it is not part of that block, and they would be OK with social democrats but not far left in government. What's wrong with that?
Well, they have said they would support the social democrat party leader as prime minister, prior to the election - as did the left and green parties and are (sort of) participating with those parties in negotiating the formation of a new government. And none have the mandates to form a government without each other. So I would say they are in fact part of the same "bloc", in some sense.
However, the left has stated that they rather reasonably won't support a government that they are not part of. The center party on the other hand has said they won't support any government that the left party is in and seem to be open to forming a government (at least not denying when being asked directly) with the right wing parties of the former government, despite that bloc losing the election.
When one party's "red lines" only seem to soften when facing the right, I think that does say something about their true intentions.
Aha ok I was wondering when I asked if you meant the internal politics or either social democrats or greens - what I think of as the two center left parties - had been going through an activist far left internal struggle (as is happening to the very separate Green Party in the UK right now).
I would say the center party is center-right.
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.
> Palahniuk was hardly the first person to use the metaphor. It's the stuff of self-help books and inspirational posters and elementary school assurances.
> In the 1970s snowflake was a disparaging term for a white man or for a black man who was seen as acting white.
> In Missouri in the early 1860s, a "Snowflake" was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery—the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/the-less-lovely-sid...
Tyler Durden, Don Drapper, Patrick Bateman, are all characters that you’re not supposed to want to be like but that “blackpilled” men completely miss the point and worship. There must be a name for this type of character influence. It reminds me of the “torrent nexus” trope but for people.
>There must be a name for this type of character influence.
Well you can spot them with a Rorschach test, perhaps.
We could all stand to think about this a little Moore.
The torment nexus, not the torrent nexus(torrent nexus sounds kinda fun)
The term is: antihero
That's the term for the character. I think they were seeking a term to describe those who perceive antiheroes to be heroes.
Correct. I wouldn’t really call them anti-heroes, however, as those are still meant to be sympathetic.
To put it less ambiguously, I’m looking for a term for a character which is written to be repulsive but a number of people in the real world misinterpret as a role model.
Yes, and it's being used ironically here. The people who pointed and laughed at those who wanted "safe spaces" and overly sensitive, are overly sensitive about people not like them getting any help. "You called us snowflakes, but you're the ones who have the fragile ego."
every accusation, confession, etc.
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Can you please say what exactly you're implying here and what that has to do with the situation AnitaB is in?
Corrected: you can't say you do anything for women that actually matters.
I think they mean women as an abstract concept
Submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50070918
…you’re calling dupe on your own submission?
I submitted it, then did a search for the domain. Noticed that there was discussion on a previous submission, thought that was worth pointing out. ChrisArchitect is pretty good at this, but sometimes I do it myself.
I forgot to do a search first.
Is there something wrong with that?
How will you get your fake internet points now?!
of course he does. why not?
this is a new low. also needs a (year) /s
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That other thread is interesting as it raises issues about how the organization is managed money-wise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082093
You don't want to run afoul of Agent Orange by celebrating a woman so close to his coronation
No, please don't make that a thing. They're a great band. They don't deserve that association. :D
I have bad news for you
Are they MAGA now too?
Do yourself a favor and search “Agent Orange” on your preferred search engine (Sidenote: I’m trying to avoid using “Google” as a verb). Most people associate that term with the very harmful Vietnam-era herbicide, not the band. The band name may be a reference to the herbicide?
It has to be.
It's not according to the singer, who came up with it.
I can understand taking his word for it, but I don't personally believe that. How could someone in 1979 not have heard of Agent Orange? It would have been all over the news: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/19/archives/vietnam-veterans... and the Vietnam war was still fresh in everyone's mind. Maybe he was embarrassed by the edgy name, which is basically a reference to an American war crime, in later years? idk.
He didn't say he hadn't hear of it. He said he didn't choose it for political reasons. I am very familiar with history and the Vietnam War.
No shit sherlock. I'm not a moron.
Because the actual association is much better?
Man, y'all are way to damn serious.
for people outside US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
Grace Brewster Hopper (née Murray; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral.[1] She was a pioneer of computer programming. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and used this theory to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language, which was a major influence on COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. She was also one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer. She is credited with writing the first computer manual, "A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator", and is often credited with creating the first compiler.
didn't find anything controversial about her in wikipedia
She was the real deal, just massively overhyped for being a woman.
Here is an earlier programming language (never implemented) that was machine independent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl
I believe they posted "often credited with creating the first compiler", which is still true in this case. Interesting choice of a counter-example for a few reasons, though.
The conference was something else. It was a mix of recruiting, networking, and speakers. It had become really expensive and had some problems in recent years.
I think she’s also well known outside the US, at least if you studied cs
Some of the best hires I ever made came through GHC - truly a sad day.
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)
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What scares me for the future of my children is that people cheer or blend in, hide, give up. All this repression is helped from multitude of directions, actively or passively, but helped. And the intentional confrontation, seeking it, is increasingly the norm while standing up for it, the protective confrontation is disappearing into the shades, under the grass, not to be seen, go dormant or in some instances, die. This will not end well.
What does discrimination against men look like and what are the impacts on men when programs try to manage structural misogyny but end up w something else? I feel like a lot of men feel they are being discriminated against (even young boys in 1st and second grade say they girls get preferential treatment even when it’s clear they are the ones being disruptive), so my question is…where is this feeling coming from? (I’m not a man so I dont get it)
For as much COBOL as my (former) coworkers use every day, they should bankroll her day.
I have to admit, I suspected the Secretary of War cancelled the funding
Who does AnitaB.org actually support or advocate for?
Their "Our Mission" page refers only to the perfectly vague "our community", never once describing what that is. Nor does their landing page. Their "Our History" page says that the organisation started out to support women in the tech industry, but then describes several name changes, eventually dropping all use of the words "woman" or "women" and switching to the user of "individuals" without explanation or elaboration. It reads like a perfectly choreographed PR "product" designed to maximise deniability of... something. But what?
Your comment is a rhetorical question.
No.
Grace Hopper may not be a casualty of the DEI backlash alone. It may also be a casualty of a hiring market that no longer needs large-scale recruiting events.
I was there a few years back and it was a total mess. Over run and recruiters being assaulted by students throwing resumes. Completely mismanaged.
brick by brick !! this is how we go back !!
I think we can safely assume that all the major sponsors from 2025 pulled out. Any one of them could have carried the whole thing.
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
So they sponsored last year, now you are asking them to pay 50x more?
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!
You clearly do not work in Tech. Grace Hopper has been around for decades, and companies have understood how important it is for furthering their industries.
This is absolutely the US Gov to blame for its DEI attacks and threats.
> mportant it is for furthering their industries
This was true 10 years ago, today not so much. After several years of cultural revolution, recent crimes, discrimination lawsuits, the entire "women in tech" subject is toxic.
Now it is in implosion phase, where activists will start eating their own (just see the hit list OP published).
Another problem is AI. Common coders will become obsolete (together with "women in tech"). There is no push for more "women in plumbing jobs". Pushing young people into tech (presumably with expensive student loans) is just cruel. Women are not stupid!
https://tradeswomen.org/ https://tradeswomentaskforce.org/about-us/
The push exists, if you bother looking for it at all.
From your link:
> increasing women’s equal access to union construction jobs
That is not the same as "plumbing jobs". They want nice cushy unionized jobs, not dirty work
There are two links, and they were the first two I found in a 2 minute search, which you could, and should, have done yourself before forming the opinion that women as a whole are not pushing for trades jobs. It's pretty clear at this point that you formed the opinion first.
The first thing I think about when I hear GHC is the gaslighting. For years I was prodded about that I should go. Men are absolutely welcome. Everyone is welcome, etc.
I never felt that I was actually welcome. And I don't have to be. It's not for me, and it doesn't have to be. I answered women inviting me that no, that wasn't made for me, have fun though.
Then mass layoffs happened, and men who lost their jobs, or looking for their first job, went.
Suddenly everything flipped. Keynote was basically "what the fuck are all you men doing here, taking the space of women?".
Oh, the gaslighting. Glad I never went.
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There are no isolated phenomena. There are no accidents. It apples to everything. Times are changing. Priorities are changing. The party is coming to an end. People are getting real. It's like the world suddenly progressed past it's childhood or waking from a musical dream.
The courtesy smiles, the pretentive presentations, the sale talk, the polite social customs, the diplomacy, the power due to knowledge, weaponry, currency fixations, - all will face the concrete realities. Water recedes exposing the naked, boisterous economies. The zero-carbon evangelists run to Russia for diesel and to China for minerals or they get extinct, unable to adapt and sitting on their presumptive glory.