The tech business for years has had an awful record of employing and retaining female engineers, and this record is getting worse. Women represent less than a third of the typical firm’s engineering staff, and in some cases such as Twitter only 10% are engineers. Top tech management ranks are almost exclusively male.

Over the years, I have accepted this sad fact of our industry, but this week I was at a conference that was almost all populated with women and girls. It was an eye opener for me. Like many of you, I have gotten used to being in a mostly male audience when I attend or speak at tech conferences. This event was called “She’s Pivotal” and the title was purposely multiple meanings. It was organized by the software vendor to showcase the brainy and accomplished women that it employed, along with some stalwarts from St. Louis. It was inspiring and a bit uncomfortable, which is what I imagine many of the female nerds feel when they sit in a typical meeting. One woman in her 50s spoke about when she first started her career; she was the sole member of her gender in most of her meetings. “Now things have progressed to where there are two or even sometimes three of us in a room.” I guess that is progress.

Then there is this: engineering schools graduate many more women that either never end up actually doing any engineering, or who leave the field after a few years. This research from last year found that nearly 40 percent of women who earn engineering degrees quit the profession or never enter the field at all. There could be a variety of reasons for this: after all, many male engineering grads also don’t end up doing engineering too.

One of the ways for tech firms to get more sensitive about women engineers was an effort last year that started to count their actual makeup. Software developer Tracy Chou’s began a voluntary collection effort on GitHub to keep track of these numbers, and numerous firms have entered their workforce gender info on her project. Most firms have less than 20% women, but there are a couple of standouts. For example, Thoughtworks has 29% with 655 women engineers, and Wells Fargo has 24% with 1300 engineers. While not listed, I do know that Mastercard has lots of women in their workforce, and they had several of them (as shown above) attending the event.

Another way is to start recognizing how women can make an engineering staff better, just by their presence. The women managers on the panel spoke about how it wasn’t their coding prowess but their ability to collaborate with others and form strong teams to get projects done. They came from companies such as Express Scripts, EMC and Monsanto. All held management titles and some of them have been around for 15 or 20 years in various engineering positions.

One speaker gave three suggestions for women to succeed in tech. “Try everything to see what you like, when in school take at least one business and engineering class, and just remember that it’s never too late to get more technical education or experience.” All are great ideas.

Ironically, Pivotal themselves isn’t the best example. While Cornelia Davis, their CTO, gave an excellent talk at their event, if you go to their management page online you can see a page of all male faces there. But at least they recognize that it is time for a change, and allowed Davis and other staff members to participate in this event. Certainly, Pivotal isn’t alone: most tech companies, indeed most companies, have all male executive suites. Sadly, the glass ceiling is still firmly in place.

Then there is the movement called #ILookLikeAnEngineer on Twitter. Last year women engineers started posting their pictures with this hashtag. It is a great idea, because the more we all can see them and can realize that there is no singular “look” the better we all will be. Of course, I posted this picture from my childhood that fits the popular stereotype. (Once a nerd, always a nerd.) Those of you that are engineers, I encourage you to post your own selfie.

One of the goals for the event was to get young girls interested in engineering fields while they were still in high school, or even younger. The event was co-sponsored by CoderGirl, a local effort that holds weekly coding meetups to help teach women and girls programming concepts. I spoke to several of the girls at the event who were considering going in this direction, and they all felt encouraged by what they heard from the professional presenters. One girl asked whether she could actually cut it in engineering, given that she wasn’t very good in math. The answer was most definitely yes: Tammy Hawkins, who went on at Mastercard to invent the “Selfie Pay” authentication app, told us that she too wasn’t a math whiz, and managed to just barely pass her last college math course. “But that was fine, because there are always people who can help you who know more,” she said.

That is actually an important point. Many of us – men and women alike – don’t often apply for a job because we don’t think we have the self-confidence or skills required. Programming is a very collaborative culture, and these days teams of programmers work together on solving problems and producing code. You aren’t always going to be the smartest person in the room.

It is time that all companies adapt to a more diverse workforce if they want to succeed. And we need to be on the leading edge in tech. It is time to fix this.

One of the more interesting aspects of our surveillance society is the use of automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology by law enforcement to track the movements of vehicles. Our legal system is far behind in treating this technology, and activists are just beginning to challenge our government in terms of proper use, managing citizen expectations, and shedding daylight on the technology and the resulting data collections.

I got interested in this technology after several trips to Israel: the main north/south freeway uses both the ALPR system and an RFID system to send tolls to those who use the roads. If you have a transponder, you are recognized by the RFID system. If you don’t the ALPR system will send you a bill from the rental company for the tolls a few weks after your rental. Theses sorts of systems are also used in several cities around the world for congestion pricing (London has been doing this for years) when a driver enters the central business district.

Then I read this article in Motherboard about how the Philadelphia police department was using ALPR equipment that was mounted to a vehicle with Google markings. While police departments often use decoy vehicles with fake business logos to hide in plain sight, I think this is the first time anyone was attempting to pass off a Google Street Maps vehicle in this fashion. Naturally, Google was not amused nor apparently consulted in this move. And while the Philly police is allowed to collect license plate data, they can’t just appropriate some legitimate business.

These automated readers are pretty powerful tools: some can collect thousands of plates an hour and can even recognize mud-splattered plates through infrared imaging. When I did my ride-along with a St. Louis city cop, he had me running plates the old fashioned way: by entering them one at a time into a car-mounted computer terminal to query a central database. It wasn’t a cumbersome process, but it did take a moment, if I typed in the plate correctly. (There is a great plot point in the Amazon series “Bosch” that hinges on a mistyped plate number, for fans of that fictional detective.)

But you might start asking questions, which is what I did, about what happens to this data once it is collected. Obviously, the chances of abuse are huge. Several years ago, the ACLU issued a report that looked in the potentials for abuse and said that ALPR technology can be “deployed with too few rules and could become a tool for mass routine location tracking and surveillance.”

On top of this there is an open data movement that allows anyone with a webcam to upload the plates they have collected to a central website. While I am normally a fan of open data, this also has great abuse potential too. What if one of my neighbors starts tracking my movements inadvertently?

There are no federal statutes that limit this collection of data, and of course each state has their own regulations about how long data can be retained and who has access to this data. Minnesota, for example, limits the data collected to only active investigations, and requires the rest to be destroyed. Some states don’t have any requirements about destruction of their data, and others allow agencies to keep the data for years. And there are two private companies that collect plate data and share the information with insurers and car repo vendors, among others.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has already brought one lawsuit against the Los Angeles police departments. According to the EFF, LAPD and LA county sheriff’s departments have collected millions of plates each week. The EFF has a nice page summarizing what these rulings across the country are at the moment.

So what can you do to defend yourself, especially if you aren’t a suspect? The answer is not much. You might be able to obscure your plate on your car if it is parked in your driveway on your own property, but once you drive it on a public street you have to keep it visible. Also, you should become familiar with the EFF talking points for activists, which are illuminating. In the meantime, keep an eye out for strange vans parked on your street.