The push toward gender equality in the tech world is, at best, a mixed bag.

And the industry knows it. Many of its biggest companies, including Apple and Facebook, admit they need to do more to attract women to their workforce. A few, such as Salesforce.com and Intel, now make sure women and men doing the same work are paid the same. On the flip side, the gaming industry still displays more than its share of harassment, and some white men still debate what a software engineer actually looks like.

To mark this year's International Women's Day on March 8, Taking a look back at the last 12 months to note both the good and bad as the tech industry figures out how to become more inclusive.


THE GOOD
Bridging the tech education gap: The push to teach more kids -- especially girls and minorities -- computer science got a boost in January, when President Barack Obama included a $4 billion Computer Science for All initiative as part of this year's proposed federal budget.

The three-year plan, which still needs congressional approval, would give states money to build up their computer science programs in grades from kindergarten through high school, helping them train teachers and develop new classroom materials.

In addition, the 100K in 10 group -- a coalition of universities, nonprofits and government agencies that aims to train and keep 100,000 new STEM teachers by 2021 -- just added nearly 50 new partners, including Girls Who Code, Harvard and the Smithsonian Science Education Center.

Intel's $300 million diversity project: The world's biggest chipmaker last month released its latest diversity report, saying 43 percent of all new hires last year were women or underrepresented minorities. As a result, the percentage of women employed by Intel in the US rose to 24.8 percent from 23.5 percent a year earlier. That small rise illustrates that change takes a long time.

Apple, which also stressed workplace diversity, published its diversity stats in January that showed women comprised 30 percent of its US workforce last year, compared with 27.7 percent in 2014. Even so, the Cupertino, California-based tech giant remains largely white and male.

Expanded parental leave: Few would claim that US companies offer enough paid time off for new mothers, but many tech companies are working to change that. Netflix in August said it would start offering "unlimited" parental leave for employees during their first years as parents. Microsoft, Amazon and PayPal last year also increased the length of their parental leave programs.

Supporting global initiatives: Silicon Valley is also throwing its weight behind global campaigns aimed at solving the root problems of gender equality. On Monday, several tech industry heavy hitters, including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, YouTube's Susan Wojcicki, Salesforce's Marc Benioff and others, teamed up with advocacy group ONE and signed a letter to world leaders declaring "poverty is sexist."


THE BAD
 

Stereotypes still rule: Last summer, OneLogin ran ads around San Francisco looking to recruit more people to the company, which focuses on cloud-based security. Such advertising wouldn't normally generate much attention, but one of OneLogin's ads did, because it included a young female engineer named Isis Anchalee. Anchalee found herself the topic of posts and messages, some positive and some negative, about her role in a male-dominated industry.

The sudden flurry of public discussion sparked Anchalee to create a campaign called #ILookLikeAnEngineer, which aimed to dispel the notion that engineers are only white and male.

Even more Gamergate woes: Gamergate was an ugly controversy in 2014 that involved some in the gaming industry bullying and making death threats against women who spoke out against female stereotypes in games. The issue reared its ugly head again late last year after organizers for the South by Southwest tech and media festival in Austin, Texas, canceled two panels on gaming-related harassment after receiving threats of violence. SXSW's leaders reversed that decision after women's rights advocates and media organizations complained.

 A tiny microbe one day could devour the millions of metric tons of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, that pile up in landfills each year. Researchers in Japan have discovered the world’s first PET-eating bacterium, a critter that uses PET as its major carbon and energy source.

Each year, plastic manufacturers pump out more than 45 million metric tons of PET to make water bottles, salad domes, peanut butter jars, and other products—all of which sport a stamp with the number one inside a recycle symbol.

PET is the most recycled plastic in the U.S., according to PETRA, the PET Resin Association. But recycling rates still only reach about 31% nationwide. The European Union does better, recycling roughly half of its PET. Even so, tens of millions of metric tons of the plastic wind up in landfills each year, where the polymer’s strong ester bonds resist breakdown.

To find microbes that could pull PET apart, a team led by Kohei Oda of Kyoto Institute of Technology and Kenji Miyamoto of Keio University screened 250 sediment, soil, wastewater, and activated sludge samples from a PET bottle recycling facility in Sakai, Japan. After some careful microbial sleuthing, they found one bacterium that thrived on PET films and named it Ideonella sakaiensis after the city where it was found.

 PET can be hydrolyzed to its monomers chemically, but this process can be slow and usually requires high temperatures and pressures. Fungi that can break down PET have been identified previously, but the bacterium identified by Oda and Miyamoto’s group appears to be more efficient than these. In fact, I. sakaiensis dices up polymer at a surprisingly mild 30 °C.

The researchers further found that I. sakaiensis uses one enzyme, which they call a PETase, to break the plastic down into the intermediate mono(2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalic acid, or MHET. Another enzyme, dubbed MHETase, hydrolyzes the MHET into the monomers terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol. The scientists think this enzymatic machinery could one day remediate PET-contaminated environments or reclaim the plastic’s starting materials, which at present are derived from petroleum.

“This could provide huge savings in the production of new polymer without the need for petrol-based starting materials,” notes Uwe T. Bornscheuer, an enzyme catalysis expert at the University of Greifswald, in a commentary that accompanies the paper.

At the moment I. sakaiensis and its enzymes need some tweaking before they’re ready to chow down on the world’s PET waste. The bacterium prefers to dine on amorphous PET, rather than the crystalline PET used in products, and the enzymes work too slowly to be used industrially.

The study’s first author, Shosuke Yoshida of Keio University, says that a PET pretreatment that would enlarge the polymer’s amorphous areas would make waste more appetizing for the bacterium. Also, he notes, it might be possible to engineer the enzymes to make them faster and more practical.

Mark Zuckerberg's ambitious mission to provide free Internet access to rural India was rejected by the people it was intended to help long before the country's regulators banned it earlier this month.

Around the country, farmers, laborers and office workers scorned Facebook's offer. Called Free Basics, it provided only limited access to the Internet through a suite of websites and services that, unsurprisingly, included Facebook. They felt the limited service didn't follow the open nature of the Internet, where all sites and online destinations should be equally accessible, so they organized real-world protests and an online Save The Internet campaign, with the message that Zuckerberg's efforts weren't welcome.

You might think people would jump at the opportunity to access Facebook for free, especially since more than a billion people use the social network every day. But it's that hitch -- that they can't access everything else -- which is precisely the problem, said Sunil Abraham, the executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society India. "Even if somebody spends 90 percent of their time on Facebook, that 10 percent is equally as important."
Indian regulators sided with popular opinion and cut off Free Basics in the world's second-most populous country on February 8. The ruling by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) forbids all zero-rating plans, meaning anyone offering customers free access to only a limited set of services of sites are banned. It was championed as a victory for Net neutrality, the principle that everyone should have equal access to all content on the Internet.

The decision was undoubtedly a blow for Facebook, which says it wants to connect the billions of have-nots around the world to the Internet through the program. While more than half the world's online population uses Facebook each month, the company's efforts to connect with the developing world -- with Free Basics also being available in over 30 other countries, such as Kenya and Iraq -- could be a boon for business.

"[The Internet] must remain neutral for everyone, individuals and businesses alike. Everyone must have equal access to it," said Rajesh Sawhney, a Mumbai-based tech entrepreneur, in support of TRAI's decision to reject Free Basics. He believes the zero-rating scheme can be misused by telcos and other companies to create divisive ecosystems, where certain brands or companies are included and others aren't.

The package wasn't without its supporters though, with some being disappointed with the government's intervention in the marketplace.

"It is generally assumed that there is something sinister behind violations of Net neutrality...but that is not always true," says software engineer Shashank Mehra. "ISPs trying to match consumer demand isn't something sinister, it is a market process."

The social media giant further defends itself by pointing out that Free Basics is open to any and all developers, including competitors Twitter and Google, as long as they meet the program's technical standards. This evidently wasn't enough to convince much of India.
The problem persists

Facebook disputes claims that its interest in India is commercial, saying its efforts are humanitarian. In speeches over the past few months, Zuckerberg has painted Internet access as a tool for global good. "The research has shown on this that for every 10 people who get access to the internet, about one person gets a new job, and about one person gets lifted out of poverty," he said at a Townhall Q&A in Delhi last October. "Connecting things in India is one of the most important things we can do in the world."

Zuckerberg appears to have taken the loss in stride. During a keynote address at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona earlier this week, he admitted to being disappointed by the ruling, but added, "We are going to focus on different programs [in India]...we want to work with all the operators there." A Facebook spokesperson said the company "will continue our efforts to eliminate barriers and give the unconnected an easier path to the Internet and the opportunity it brings."

Those ideals could certainly help in India, where around 68 percent of its population -- about 880 million people -- live in rural conditions or poverty. The promise of free access to health, education, local and national news through an Internet connection could potentially improve quality of live. So what's the problem?

The service providers would also be granting free Facebook.

Peggy Wolff, a volunteer coordinator at education NGO Isha Vidhya, says Facebook is just the latest in a long line of international companies hoping to crack rural India, where the bulk of the country's poor live.

While admitting that low cost or free Internet is imperative in rural areas, that "smart villages" are needed to help ease the human burden on India's increasingly overcrowded cities, she says, "Free basics is just a bit suspicious to most people. There's just too much vested interest."

Your phone is getting better and better at protecting your privacy. But Uncle Sam isn't totally comfortable with that, because it's also complicating the work of tracking criminals and potential national-security threats.For decades, tech companies have steadily expanded the use of encryption — a data-scrambling technology that shields information from prying eyes, whether it's sent over the Internet or stored on phones and computers.

 For almost as long, police and intelligence agencies have sought to poke holes in the security technology, which can thwart investigators even when they have a legal warrant for, say, possibly incriminating text messages stored on a phone.

The authorities haven't fared well; strong encryption now keeps strangers out of everything from your iMessages to app data stored on the latest Android phones. But in the wake of the Paris attacks, US officials are again pushing for limits on encryption, even though there's still no evidence the extremists used it to safeguard their communications.While various experts are exploring ways of resolving the impasse, none are making much headway. For now, the status quo favors civil libertarians and the tech industry, although that could change quickly — for instance, should another attack lead to mass US casualties. Such a scenario could stampede Congress into passing hasty and potentially counterproductive restrictions on encryption."

There are completely reasonable concerns on both sides," said Yeshiva University law professor Deborah Pearlstein. The aftermath of an attack, however, "is the least practical time to have a rational discussion about these issues."Encryption plays a little heralded, yet crucial role in the modern economy and daily life. It protects everything from corporate secrets to the credit-card numbers of online shoppers to the communications of democracy advocates fighting totalitarian regimes.At the same time, recent decisions by Apple and Google to encrypt smartphone data by default have rankled law enforcement officials, who complain of growing difficulty in getting access to the data they feel they need to build criminal cases and prevent attacks. For months, the Obama administration — which has steered away from legislative restrictions on encryption — has been in talks with technology companies to brainstorm ways of giving investigators legal access to encrypted information.But technology experts and their allies say there's no way to grant law enforcement such access without making everyone more vulnerable to cybercriminals and identity thieves. 

"It would put American bank accounts and their health records, and their phones, at a huge risk to hackers and foreign criminals and spies, while at the same time doing little or nothing to stop terrorists," Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in an interview Monday.Lawmakers on the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence remain on what they call an "exploratory" search for options that might expand access for law enforcement, although they're not necessarily looking at new legislation.The FBI and police have other options even if they can't read encrypted files and messages. So-called metadata — basically, a record of everyone an individual contacts via phone, email or text message — isn't encrypted, and service providers can make it available when served with subpoenas. Data stored on remote computers in the cloud — for instance, on Apple's iCloud service or Google's Drive — is also often available to investigators with search warrants. (Apple and Google encrypt that data, but also hold the keys.)

Some security experts suggest that should be enough. Michael Moore, chief technology officer and co-founder of the Baltimore, Maryland-based data security firm Terbium Labs, noted that police have managed to take down online criminals even without bypassing encryption. He pointed to the 2013 take down of Silk Road, a massive online drug bazaar that operated on the "dark Web," essentially the underworld of the Internet."The way they figured that out was through good old-fashioned police work, not by breaking cryptography," Moore said. "I don't think there's a shortcut to good police work in that regard."Others argue that the very notion of "compromise" makes no sense where encryption is concerned. "Encryption fundamentally is about math," said Mike McNerney, a fellow on the Truman National Security Project and a former cyber policy adviser to the Secretary of Defense.

 "How do you compromise on math?" He called the idea of backdoors "silly."Some in law enforcement have compromise ideas of their own. The Manhattan District Attorney's office, for instance, recently called for a federal law that would require smartphone companies to sell phones they could unlock for government searches — in essence, forcing them to hold the keys to user data.In a report on the subject, the office called its suggestion a "limited proposal" that would only apply to data stored on smartphones and restrict searches to devices that authorities had already seized. Privacy advocates and tech companies aren't sold, saying it would weaken security for phones that are already too vulnerable to attack

.Marcus Thomas, the chief technology officer at Subsentio and former assistant director of the FBI's operational technology division, argued that it's too late to turn back the clock on strong encryption, putting law enforcement in a "race against time" to obtain investigatory data whenever and wherever it can. But he urged security experts to find ways to help out investigators as they design next-generation encryption systems.The idea of allowing law enforcement secure access to encrypted information doesn't faze Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation — provided a warrant is involved. Unfortunately, he says, cryptographers agree that the prospect is a "pure fantasy."