The Grace Hopper Celebration is coming to Philly in 2024

Mark your calendars: Around this time next year, an estimated tens of thousands of women and nonbinary technologists will be convening in Philly for the annual Grace Hopper Celebration.

This conference, which was named after Rear Admiral Grace Hopper who was one of the first women to receive a doctorate in mathematics, brings together technologists for a few days of networking, professional development opportunities, and recognizing the work women and nonbinary people are doing in the industry.

The Grace Hopper Celebration 2024 will be held on Oct. 8 to 11 next year.

The event is hosted by AnitaB.org, an organization that supports women and nonbinary people in the technology field. Generally, the org hosts events, gives out grants and awards, and completes research that support women and nonbinary people in technology.

Gloria Bell, the Philly-based head of the Women in Tech Summit (WITS), attended the 2023 GHC in Orlando last month, as well as last year’s conference virtually. She has been a member of AnitaB.org for several years, and that org’s president and CEO, Brenda Darden Wilkerson, spoke at WITS’ Chicago summit this year, too.

She told Technical.ly it’s “incredibly exciting” the GHC will be held in Philly in 2024.

“To have an organization and conference of this caliber, that supports women and non-binary individuals, choose to come to a city and region that has so many organizations with aligned missions doing good work is uplifting for us all,” Bell said. “The attention that a conference of this size can draw is good for everyone involved.”

This is the first year that the Grace Hopper Celebration will come to Philadelphia. The news comes after AntiaB.org previously announced that 2023 would be the last year it would host the conference in Florida, due to the increasingly limited LGBTQ+ rights in the state.