An opinion piece published in The New York Times entitled “Are College Lectures Unfair?” provides a clue to the persistent gender and race gaps in computer science [1]. The author, Annie Murphy Paul, poses several provocative questions: “Does the college lecture discriminate? Is it biased against undergraduates who are not white, male, and affluent?” She proceeds to explain how a growing body of research shows that “the lecture is not generic or neutral, but a specific cultural form that favors some people while discriminates against others, including women, minorities, and low-income first generation college students.” Paul then contrasts the lecture with active learning, where students construct knowledge through hands-on problem solving, engaging with the material through group work, collaborative thinking, and where students anchor their learning in knowledge they possess and cultural references with which they are familiar. For educators of computer science, a field that has been largely taught through lecture and direct instruction, research supporting active inquiry-based learning should give everyone pause to reflect and discuss.

There is an increasingly urgent need to engage people in computing, not only to satisfy growing workforce demands, but also to empower people to create and control the devices we use in our day-to-day lives. In computing, broadening the participation of persons from underrepresented groups is a matter of equity. Globally, underrepresentation differs regionally and culturally by gender, race, ethnicity, socio-economic advantage, physical or mental impairment, and LGBT status.

Three years ago in May 2012, as Terry Benzel, Deputy Director, Computer Networks Division, Information Sciences Institute at USC, Hilarie Orman, The Purple Streak (a software security firm), and I, Susan, then a visiting scholar at Harvard, sat at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, we had trouble seeing any other women. As women researchers in security and privacy of a certain age, we were accustomed to that. But we were not accustomed to the original proposal for the program committee for the following year’s program committee: forty men, two women. We looked at each other. There was not “world enough and time” to wait for the situation to change; we needed to take action now.