Just shown onstage: this wonderful slide of the 18 female elected heads of state: President Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner, Argentina Prime Minister Mari Johanna Kiviniemi, Finland President Borjana Krišto, Bosnia and Herzegovina President Doris Leuthard, Switzerland President Pratibha Patil, India Prime Minister Julia Gill...

In 2010 the U.S. Army Special Operations Command created a pilot program to put women on the battlefield in Afghanistan. In this edited excerpt from her book, Ashley's War, writer Gayle Tzemach Lemmon shares the background that led to this game-changing decision. From the start of the war, U.S. Special Operations Commander Eric Olson believed t...

Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, who won the 2016 Oscar for Best Documentary Short, explains why she feels it's her duty to focus on topics others shy away from ... like honor killings. Film has a way of revealing the soul of each person you see onscreen, giving a human face to issues that might otherwise only be expressed as a headline or a statistic. I...

Written by Morley. Performed onstage at TEDWomen by Morley and Toshi Reagon. They stood together under a tree 
in tall grass on TV 
telling the world their story 
 We will be left to wander and fade away, soldiers came and took our husbands at the break of day 
 We will live on then fade away, soldiers came and killed our children at th...

What is an idea, really, if you keep it to yourself? No, ideas are meant to be shared. In this session, stories of connection — from Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, who have been friends since 9 to 5, to Jenni Chang and Lisa Dazols, a couple who traveled around the world documenting the lives of "supergays." Short recaps of the talks in this ...

Often, discussions about equality center around leaning in, or whether or not the glass ceiling has got cracks in it. But for many women, the focus is on surviving everyday violence, assault and rape -- a daily struggle that plays a part in keeping a billion people locked into poverty. Gary Haugen (TED Talk: The hidden reason for poverty the wor...

One of anthropologist Margaret Mead’s most famous quotes instructs us: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” We might amend Mead’s observation to honor a group of thoughtful, committed teenagers across the world who are standing up for their lives (...

More and more women are being incarcerated in the US -- before they’ve been found guilty of crimes. Here’s how the bail system affects women and what can be done. Robin Steinberg’s big idea -- The Bail Project, a national revolving bail fund designed to make sure people can await trial from their own homes, not from jail -- was one of the first...

During an interview at TEDWomen 2013, host Pat Mitchell asked Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to explain how her 2010 TED Talk evolved. “I asked myself the question that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and my boss, asks all of us, which is: What would I do if I wasn’t afraid?” Sandberg said. Her answer: “I would get on the TED stage...

One billion is certainly in the zeitgeist. V-day, the global campaign founded by four-time TED speaker Eve Ensler to end violence against women and girls, recently unveiled its One Billion Rising initiative. The name comes from the horrifying statistic that 1 in 3 women will be beaten or abused in their lifetime — on a global scale, 1 bill...

Poet Suheir Hammad performs two spine-tingling spoken-word pieces: "What I Will" and "break (clustered)" -- meditations on war and peace, on women and power. Wait for the astonishing line: "Do not fear what has blown up. If you must, fear the unexploded." (Recorded at TEDWomen, December 2010, in Washington, DC. Duration: 5:52) Watch Suheir Ha...

The Shape What's to Come ambassadors, with Lakshmi Pratury from the INK Conference, talk in the journaling space -- while behind them, visualization artist Sunni Brown doodles their ideas into shape. Photo: James Duncan Davidson / TED At TEDGlobal this year, we're meeting three ambassadors of Levi's Shape What's to Come campaign -- three ...