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The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) today announced record breaking attendance levels for its 8th Annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. The world’s largest gathering of women in computing in industry, academia, and government, the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) is a four-day technical conference designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. The conference, attended by 1,450 people, took place in Keystone, Colorado, October 1-4, 2008.
GHC featured more than 85 panels and workshops, and more than 300 speakers. Highlighting the conferences were keynotes delivered by Fran Allen and Mary Lou Jepsen. Allen is widely known for her work on compilers, compiler optimization, parallelism, and high-performance systems, and is the first woman to win the Turing Award, computing’s highest honor. Jepsen, recently named one of TIME magazine’s “100 most influential people in the world,” was the first CTO of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), an organization whose mission is to deliver low-cost, mesh-networked laptops en masse to children in developing countries. Jepsen has since founded Pixel Qi. The conference also featured a CTO Plenary Panel featuring Sophie Vandebroek,CTO Xerox, Nan Mattai, Senior VP Engineering and Technology, Rockwell Collins, Greg Papadopoulos, CTO and Executive VP Research and Development, Sun Microsystems and Justin Rattner, CTO, Intel.
More than 100 companies sent representatives to the conference, including platinum sponsors CA, Cisco, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, National Science Foundation and Sun Microsystems.
Students from nearly 200 universities and colleges participated in the conference as both speakers and attendees. Undergraduate and graduate students make up more than 47 percent of the conference attendees.
Other highlights of the conference included Recession Proofing Your Career, a workshop led by leadership coach Jo Miller and sponsored by Cisco, which had more than 600 participants. It was followed by a speed networking event that attracted over 350 participants.
In addition, a new resume clinic was attended by 160 students, who had the opportunity to meet with recruiters from 40 technology companies. The conference also featured a poster session featuring the work of 95 undergraduate and graduate students from around the world as well as two women technologists from the USS Hopper.
In conjunction with the Grace Hopper Celebration, the Anita Borg Institute and the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Studies at Stanford, distributed 1,500 copies of its groundbreaking research report Climbing the Technical Ladder: Obstacles and Solutions for Mid-Level Women in Technology. Talks on the study were featured at the conference, including a special session with 39 CTOs from leading technology companies. Funding and support for Climbing the Technical Ladder was provided by the National Science Foundation grant #0413538 through National Center for Women and Information Technology.
About the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI)
The Anita Borg Institute provides resources and programs to help industry, academia, and government recruit, retain, and develop women leaders in high-tech fields, resulting in higher levels of technological innovation. ABI programs serve high-tech women by creating a community and providing tools to help them develop their careers. ABI is a not-for-profit 501(c) 3 charitable organization. ABI Partners include: Google, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Intel, SAP, Juniper Networks, National Science Foundation, National Center for Women and Information Technology, IBM, Symantec, Computer Associates, NetApp, and Capgemini.
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