Thoughts from the Grace Hopper Conference (2024)

This past week I attended the Grace Hopper Conference (GHC). My original motivations for attending were that 1) as a 3rd year PhD student, I was yet to attend a conference (due to timing of qualifying exams, illnesses, and having things to present about), 2) I won free registration, and 3) one of my best friends lives in Philly, where the conference was being held, and I could stay with her. However, it ended up being a very eye-opening and informative experience, if not exactly for the reasons I expected.

One of the conversations I had that keeps resurfacing in my mind was with two women who worked at YouTube in London. They joined me at a table outside of the convention center where the conference was being held to eat and take pictures with their lunches. In addition to being cool and worldly (Francesca was from Italy and Maria from Venezuela), both of them were down to earth and honest. When we were discussing the size of the conference and just how many people were there, Maria said something along the lines of, “Yeah, you think you’re special as a Latina woman in tech. But them you come here and realize there’s a million others just like you.”

My status as the minority gender in most of the academic/professional settings I’ve been in since graduating high school has never bothered me much. Every once in a while, I use it to justify my mistakes or why my group project teammates were incompetent and uncommunicative and I was once again being forced to be the team’s project manager. I remember there being a few times when I felt like male students didn’t take my ideas seriously and more than a few times when they couldn’t seem to make eye contact with me while I was speaking–while this is probably the most excusable thing to happen (I know some of those guys hadn’t been in contact with many girls), it used to bother me more than anything else. I remember wondering just a little bit if being a woman helped me win my National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, but I knew I had worked hard enough and my credentials were strong enough that it didn’t keep me up at night. Ultimately I graduated my 70% male class at Georgia Tech and went on to an internship at TerraPower where I was the only girl in a group of 11 interns feeling lucky and accomplished, but not because I was a woman.

However, with so much talk about how effective DEI initiatives are and the banning of affirmative action in college admissions, I just feel confused about everything. On the one hand, increasing the n