More than 9,000 women packed Austin's Moody Center on Monday for the 2026 Texas Conference for Women, a daylong gathering built around artificial intelligence, career growth, leadership, and navigating a changing workplace. The mainstage lineup included actress Kristen Bell, journalist Hoda Kotb, Team USA Rugby Olympian Ilona Maher, Peloton instructor Tunde Oyeneyin, and financial author Codie Sanchez.
The crowd size and keynote roster were detailed by FOX 7 Austin, which covered the event as it unfolded at the UT Austin arena. The conference also featured speaker names drawn from a lineup confirmed by the Austin Chamber of Commerce, which listed Bell, Kotb, Maher, Oyeneyin, and Sanchez as the headline mainstage draws for this year's event.
Why The Conference Landed At Moody Center
This is the second straight year the event has been staged away from its traditional downtown home. The conference moved its physical operations to the Moody Center in 2025 because of the multi-year closure and $1.6 billion redevelopment of the Austin Convention Center, according to Conferences for Women. Hoodline previously reported on how that convention center shutdown sent major bookings scattering across the city, including in its story on how the JW Marriott rode the river wave to capture displaced event business, and in its coverage of the court decision that cleared the $1.35 billion bond package funding the rebuild.
The Moody Center itself opened on the UT Austin campus in April 2022 at a cost of $375 million, with a 15,000-seat capacity and an operable scrim system that lets organizers reconfigure the arena bowl for different crowd sizes, per UT News. That flexibility has made the arena a go-to substitute for large-scale conferences that once relied on the shuttered downtown convention hall.
A Quarter-Century Of Growth, With A Changed Format
First launched in Austin in 2000, the Texas Conference for Women has grown over its 25-plus-year history into one of the nation's largest gatherings for working women.
Attendees at the event could also earn up to 7.0 HRCI and SHRM continuing education credits through a partnership with professional training platform Workology, per Conferences for Women.
The Moody Center's two-level concourse collection included sponsor and small-business booths, according to Conferences for Women. The conference also offered discounted community ticket packages in 2026. The setup shows how an arena built for basketball and concerts can accommodate conference exhibits alongside a different kind of crowd.
Career Growth And A Changing Workplace Career growth and navigating a changing workplace were among the conference's themes, alongside leadership and artificial intelligence.
