An effective alternative to the Grace Hopper Celebration

Motivated by the significance and the consequences of women’s underrepresentation in computing, researchers evaluated the effectiveness of a project linking ACM-W’s (Association for Computing Machinery’s Women in Computing) Celebrations of Women in Computing (conferences) with projects sponsored by two additional organizations in the United States, the Anita Borg Institute’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) and the National Center of Women & IT’s Annual Summit. The collaborative project, funded by the National Science Foundation and titled, the Grace Hopper Regional Consortium, featured twelve new regional Celebrations of Women in Computing (Celebrations). An external assessment agency surveyed conference organizers and participants. The paper analyzes data derived from the surveying, demonstrating the impact of the conferences on Celebration attendees, and shows for the first time a comparison of identical survey items from separate GHC and Celebrations assessments.