A new report released today by the United Nations Development Fund for Women highlights the pressing demand for female voices in the global fight against HIV/AIDS, and in particular the voices of HIV-positive women. Currently, less than a quarter of the leadership of global AIDS-fighting organizations are female, and only eight percent — of either gender — are HIV positive. The culprits of this imbalance, according to the researchers, are pretty much exactly what you’d expect: gender norms, stigma, the heavy burden of responsibility in domestic life and illiteracy.

I have to pause here, because at some point, the facts and figures of AIDS become almost mind numbing. Many people scanning this blog have no doubt already stopped reading because really, who wants to be told (again) that HIV is responsible for something really shitty in the world? We already know that this is a big ass mean bully of an epidemic, the kind that preys on the weak and takes advantage of those least able to protect themselves, that it’s killed 25 million people and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. So is anyone really surprised to hear that it’s also swallowing the voices of the very people it’s killing? I doubt it.

But that’s the thing about the AIDS epidemic in general–its immensity and scope and general scariness smother a lot of us until we feel like we are powerless to respond at all. But when it comes to the issue of women’s leadership, there’s no need to think about it in that huge and abstract way. Of course AIDS would be a million times easier to fight if there were no gender inequality or stigma or illiteracy in the world, but at this moment we’re simply talking about elevating voices who have the background and experience to advocate smartly for immediate, high impact changes.

We need to have people in board rooms who can tell us things that are probably glaringly obvious to them — like that condoms only work to prevent HIV so long as the dude is on board with it, and that we should keep our focus and money on a microbicide gel that women could use without their partner even knowing (a version of which was unveiled this afternoon). We need women to tell us that yes, they want to prevent transmission of HIV to their babies, but that bottle-feeding (breast milk transmits the virus) is like slapping a giant scarlet letter on their foreheads. Issues like these are the ones that HIV-positive women would likely raise as part of the global AIDS leadership, because they don’t and can’t think of AIDS as an abstraction. They see it in terms of the small and concrete things that will have a direct impact on their lives. And right now, that’s exactly what we need.

Pyne’s book isn’t just an overview of the Voyager program; it’s a sweeping history of what Pyne calls the “third age of discovery,” beginning with the first sputterings of Sputnik and reaching all the way to our recent space shuttle disasters. Along the way, we’re treated to a dense but intriguing sweep of the eras of exploration past, from the Europeans poking their heads (and swords) into the Americas to the frost-bitten teams trudging toward the two poles. Strapping ourselves to rockets bound for outer space, Pyne reminds us, wasn’t the first crazy idea that curious humans ever had.

Salon spoke with Pyne about the importance of the Voyager mission, the overlap between science fiction and reality, and our misguided desire to shoot humans into space.

I always identify the space age with Neil Armstrong walking around on the moon. Do you think that in 50 or 100 years we’ll look back and realize those moments weren’t as monumentally important as they feel now?

I think we’ll see Apollo as a fascinating program, a great moment in American history, but I think we’ll also see that it didn’t necessarily lead anywhere else. It may have been a dead end. To give an analogy, it’s not like Columbus landing in the Bahamas. It’s more like the Norse landing in Greenland or Polynesians getting to Easter Island. It didn’t take us any further. The momentum, the future, has all gone to things like Voyager, the unmanned explorers.

Probes like Voyager also send back images that anyone can see. It democratizes the process of exploration.

Yes. It’s very much a collective enterprise. Hundreds of thousands of people have put these things together, and then many, many people can experience them at the same time, and that really changes the dynamic of how you tell the story [of exploration] and how it’s recorded culturally. Voyager was launched in 1977, so it was a long time before Facebook and social networking, but in a sense that may be part of the story: That’s where exploration is going, too. It’s not single author, single experience anymore. There may be more of a network.

We’ve had to grapple with the idea of robots doing our exploration for us, instead of just being able to go everywhere ourselves. To some people that’s disappointing.

It’s hard for us to grasp, so we anthropomorphize the robots. It makes sense. They are our creations, as much as a painting or a building or a set of laws. They express our values, our ideas, our aspirations. They are proxies, and I think people respond to them in that way. But for those people who are disappointed not to see people in space doing the exploring, I’d say, you really don’t need to be there as a human — what experiences can a human even have in space? Can you smell? Can you taste? Can you touch? I mean, you’re encased in this artificial environment that really cuts off all of your senses to the outside. You can see, but we could probably see as well or better with instruments. So why not send a robot in your place?

In the last 500 years, you say there have been these three big ages of discovery — first Magellan and Columbus and that whole crew in the 1500s, then the treks to the interiors of the continents in the 18th and 19th centuries, and now our current age. What causes people during a certain time period to become intensely focused on exploration?

Each new phase of exploration is characterized by several things coming together. One is the technology that allows you to get to new places — you can’t explore unless you have the physical and scientific means. Another is the motivation, the cultural interest in going. That’s why large-scale shifts in the world tend to translate into eras of exploration — the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, modernism. And then lastly, an era of exploration requires some kind of rivalry, a geopolitical contest. Curiosity by itself just isn’t enough. Technology by itself isn’t enough. There has to be some kind of competition to propel it.

The current era of exploration seems fundamentally different in the sense that there aren’t any people to encounter in the places we’re going, and it’s a lot harder to do the things we used to, like set up colonies.

Yes, fundamental, because one of the ways we understand exploration is in terms of the encounters that come from it. On the positive side, in space you strip away a lot of the horror and the cruelty that accompanied exploration and conquest in the past. It’s just not going to happen this time around because, simply put, there’s nobody out there. On the other hand, that contact has always been part of the moral drama of exploration, what really gives it its bite, so if there are not people out there to find, it raises the question, Will we care in the same way? Hasn’t that always been the payoff, to find new people and to engage?

For some people this new era just doesn’t look right, particularly in those countries like the United States that were settled — because for the narrative of exploration we need colonization, or at least some kind of cross-cultural exchange. In my mind, that’s not really necessary for exploration, but it may be the reason that NASA has committed very heavily since the beginning to the “humans in space” story, and sold space to us with human interest and drama. But the truth is, there’s very little science coming out of things like the shuttle or the space stations, and they bleed the agency dry. I think it was the wrong choice.

How important has science fiction been in shaping the way we think of space exploration?

Science fiction actually preceded it, and many people involved in the program had grown up reading these books and took the ideas within them very seriously. I think that what made the literary side so potent was that it gave space exploration a sense of story. It helped us answer those big-picture questions: What does this all mean? How can we understand what is unfolding?

But these stories are also part of the reason that we seek a human narrative in space, because science fiction, like all good literature, is based on conflict and character. “Star Trek” can populate this imaginary world with all these other beings, and that’s the drama. They’re not just out there encountering the magnetosphere or some unknown planet; they’re dealing with living, sentient forms. If you don’t have that, how does it work? I’m not sure that the fiction could cope with that, but the reality must.

And the Voyagers themselves are also literally carrying a story — a recording that’s supposed to showcase humanity to any alien life the probes might find out there.

They are each equipped with a gold-plated phonograph record and instructions (if anyone is able to decode them) on how to play it. They’re filled with sounds and greetings in most of the earth’s languages. It sounds crazy, but I think the people who put these messages together were fairly clear that it was a one-in-a-billion chance that any other being would hear them, but they knew that everyone on earth would. The Voyagers aren’t going to come home — they’re just going to continue out indefinitely, so it’s not the classic exploration or questing narrative, where you leave and then come back with what you’ve learned. The Voyagers will never do that. And so maybe for our own sanity as explorers they had to carry that narrative with them.

So what is the next era of exploration?

Who knows. I think we have a long time to run with this era and imagining beyond is too much for me. I’m happy to just ride Voyager out, ride it to the edge and see what comes back. We still have lots of planets. We haven’t been to Pluto yet, though there’s a spacecraft on its way now. I think we’ll be doing this space business for a while.

So when Joan got an invitation to the newly minted TEDWomen, she wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or insulted. Was this the real deal, or some kind of consolation prize? She knew TED’s track record — less than 20 percent of “TED talks,” as conference presentations are known, have been given by women, and of the speakers at this year’s conference, only 17 of 57 will be. Why create a new female-focused conference, Joan wondered, rather than just integrate more women into the program of TED itself?

She shared the email invitation with staff, and asked for reactions. Soon Broadsheet had a mission: to find out what this TEDWomen business was all about. I called up June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media and an organizer of TEDWomen, who filled me in on the story behind the newest TED spinoff. In the last few years, she explained, “conventional wisdom about the importance of women globally has really shifted.” The TED team watched as the role of women in global issues like public health, economic growth, and peacekeeping shifted into the foreground. And at the same time, a new generation of smart, highly educated women were making intriguing intellectual contributions that lacked a vehicle to carry them into the public eye. “We wanted to showcase all of these ideas by and about women in one place,” she said.

But I still wondered, didn’t a conference like this risk boxing off the ideas of these brilliant women (and men–the conference will also feature male speakers) by relegating them to a special “women’s interest” category? After all, it does mean their speeches won’t be a part of the extremely popular TEDGlobal conference, whose archived talks are responsible for drawing most of the 25 million viewers to the group’s website.

“People have asked us this,” Cohen said, “are we segregating ourselves by having a women’s conference? And the answer is no.” TED, she explained, has a history of “niche” conferences — a TEDAfrica, a TEDIndia, a TED at the State Department. The women’s conference will simply be the next in this line. “Yes, it won’t appeal to everyone, but that is part of our point. When you try to appeal to everyone, we find you don’t appeal to anyone at all.”

It makes some sense. It’s not as if issues concerning women don’t deserve a global forum. Actually, they probably deserve a few thousand, you know, to make up for that whole male affirmative action program we’re running here called “the entire history of the world.” And the megaphone that the TED brand provides can only be a boon to the stunningly intelligent thinkers who will no doubt fill the ranks of TEDWomen, many of whom might never have broken the TED glass ceiling otherwise. Considering that 50 percent more men than women achieve tenure at American universities and the even wider disparity among science faculty, an arena from which TED draws many of its experts, it’s no surprise that the general conference is so gender-skewed — and maybe an alternate event showcasing women is exactly the way to combat that.

However, given the wonky gender imbalance in other TED conferences, it’s hard to shake the feeling that creating a separate event for women simply throws up another barrier to their full participation in the TED brand. By partitioning the ideas of women — and the issues that face them — into their own conference, you risk marginalizing women further, and providing an excuse to not worry about the role of women in TED at large. And when you’re in the idea-spreading business, it’s important to make sure that your ideas are going out not just to the people most inclined to listen to them, but also — perhaps especially — to those who are not. And when it comes down to it, big ideas for and by women need to be heard by a group beyond those inclined to attend a TEDWomen conference.

Female thinkers are often accused of chattering back and forth to themselves, preaching to a choir of the converted and avoiding pushing their message into a wider arena. Broadsheet itself has been called a “pink ghetto”at times and, yes, I’m sure we do have many loyal readers from the women’s studies set — but, truth be told, the people who end up here don’t always mean to. Many of them stumble onto our site from Salon’s front page or a Google search for “Miley Cyrus upskirt,” and find themselves confronted with views they don’t exactly jive with (for reference see … every comment thread on this page). And you know what? That’s exactly how discussion begins.

My hope for TEDWomen is that it will have the same effect, that the women and issues it pushes will worm their way into the general TED consciousness, that they will expose and discuss gender inequity, not only in the world, but within the organization itself. And maybe, just maybe, it will help the big TED conference identify some kickass women who can be integrated into the official event.

The study, which has been conducted every five years since 1989, analyzed not only the amount of coverage that women’s sports received, but also the type. Using three two-week blocks in 2009 — one each in March, July and November — it found that not a single episode of SportsCenter or network sports news shows led with a story about women’s sports. And the pieces that did focus on female athletes tended toward the “female soccer player pulls teammate’s hair” genre of coverage rather than the “hey, look at this amazing athletic performance” ilk. The obvious reaction to this kind of study is to argue, well, of course ESPN doesn’t focus on women’s sports. After all, it’s a business, not a gender equity nonprofit, and the sports that sell big in this country overwhelmingly star men. Why might that be?

The argument I tend to hear advanced by partisans of men’s sports, male and female, is that they are more interesting — the players are stronger and faster, they have more skill, and even the best women’s teams would be blasted by their male counterparts. There is also the fact that sports broadcasts tend to have predominantly male audiences — which introduces a tangled knot of nature/nurture, chicken/egg questions: Do men have a greater inherent interest in sports or is it the result of cultural influence? If there were more female athletes featured in TV sports coverage, would more women watch sports? It may be impossible to untangle these various factors, but, as the USC study smartly points out, there is no denying that TV sports coverage not only reflects viewer interest, it also helps to generate it.

Justice Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, however, called the approval of the measure, which enjoys the support of some 80 percent of French citizens, a victory for humanitarian values that “are the foundations of the greatness of France.” If passed by the Senate as expected later this year, the law will make wearing the burqa a crime punishable by a fine of approximately $200, as well as impose a far steeper penalty — up to $40,000 and a year in jail–on any man found guilty of forcing a woman to veil.

Even if the ban gets the approval of the full Parliament, however, it is still likely to face another challenger, the French Council of State, which advises on “no uncontestable legal basis can be found for an outright and generalized ban on the wearing of the full veil.” So we’ll still have to wait and see where the chips ultimately fall on this one. For now all I can say is that it’s a pretty bizarre way for the French to ring in their independence day.