ICS Students Attend 2023 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing

The UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) sent 22 undergraduate and graduate students to the 2023 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) in Orlando, Florida. Attendance at the conference was supported with funds from a 2014 award from the BRAID (Building Recruiting And Inclusion for Diversity) Initiative and through an ICS Academic Bronze conference sponsorship.

“GHC is a great venue for our ICS women to network, collaborate and find mentors among an inspiring community of women technologists from around the world,” said Vinh Luong, Assistant Director of the Stacey Nicholas Office of Outreach, Access & Inclusion (OAI) in the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences, who attended the event. “I wish every student would attend; it’s an amazing experience for all.”

The GHC 2023 conference, held from Sept. 26–29, is produced by the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology and presented in partnership with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). GHC is considered the world’s largest gathering of women technologists, with more than 30,000 registered attendees.

The BRAID initiative launched in September 2014 in partnership with universities across the nation to increase the percentage of women and students of color majoring in computer science. Each university committed to a set of approaches to increase diversity within their computer science departments. The program has been discontinued, but a report tracking BRAID over five years is available online.