"A poem should always have birds in it," wrote the North American poet Mary Oliver in 1990. A lover of nature, and especially of birds, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1984 spent decades carefully observing how cardinal eggs break or how chicks chirp demanding food. In her book Devotions she explains how she waited for hours for the arrival of the water thrush. Today, however, birdwatching has become an activity that, far from being practiced only in solitude, is also experienced in community.In Catalonia, more and more women are approaching ornithology through organized groups, collective outings, or small learning networks where, in addition to identifying species, they find a way to share knowledge and build community outdoors."At first, you learn much faster when accompanied, because someone can guide you and make you see details that you would overlook on your own. But it's also important to look at it yourself in the guide, internalize it, and then put it into practice," explains Jaroa López Carrasco, a conservation biologist and technician at Paisatges Vius, where she works to protect endangered species.López, an ornithologist since she was thirteen, became fond of it thanks to a bird guide she had at home and her first outings to the Llobregat Delta with her uncle. But, once immersed in this world, she realized that most of her hobby companions were men. "It continues to be a field in which men predominate, that is evident, but I increasingly see more girls and women interested in this hobby," assures López.A historically masculinized hobby

It's quite curious. All of us, or almost all of us, know the name of Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente. On the other hand, we struggle to remember the names of researchers, scientific illustrators, or conservationists who also dedicated their lives to birds and nature. For a long time, the main obstacle has been invisibility. Precisely to combat this lack of role models, Lechuzas Pajareras was born in 2019, an organization that brings together women dedicated to the study of birds, research, conservation, and the dissemination of nature."In some associations, women make up nearly 60% of members, but this is not always reflected in decision-making spaces. Many times we are more present in administrative or support tasks, while positions of responsibility continue to be occupied mostly by men," explains Uca Díaz, spokesperson for the organization.What began as a group of twelve women is today a network of more than 350 members throughout the State. "Creating community is very important. One of the most beautiful things is to share experiences and hear other women say: «It has happened to me too». This allows us to feel accompanied and to talk without paternalism".

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"A hole is a hole; for an afternoon it's fine." This is the slogan for the municipal festivals chosen by a local group from the Valencian town of Sagunt on a poster showing the image of a woman being penetrated by a bull. The Feminist Coordinator of Camp de Morvedre has denounced the poster for being "clearly demeaning" and an attack "against women's rights".

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Gothic literature became popular in the late 18th century and spread nightmares among readers for much of the 19th century, with well-known examples such as Frankenstein (1818), by Mary W. Shelley, Wuthering Heights (1847), by Emily Brontë, The strange case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), by Robert Louis Stevenson and Dracula (1897), by Bram Stoker. Two centuries later, Núria Gómez Gabriel (Barcelona, 1987) and Ingrid Guardiola (Girona, 1980), writers, university lecturers and art curators, have set out to revive Gothic "anachronistically and queer to speak of those feminine emanations of a supernatural, morbid, mysterious, tremendous, and even abject character, which have resisted opprobrium, defamation, or extreme violence". The protagonists of the essay they have written on the subject four-handed, Gothic feminism (H&O Editorial, 2026), are writers like Virginie Despentes, Mariana Enriquez, Dolors Miquel, Mónica Ojeda and Samanta Schweblin, but also filmmakers like Sofia Coppola and Julia Ducornau and artists like Louise Bourgeois, Paula Rego and Remedios Varo.

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This heat that suffocates and weakens us is, as it could not be otherwise, a great generator of conversation topics this summer. What about climate change, what about adapting to it, what about air conditioners doing us more harm than good. In many of these exchanges of ideas and experiences, I have detected a common element.

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Between May 27 and 30, 1976, the paranimph of the University of Barcelona brought together more than three thousand women who crowded a space where current legislation today indicates a maximum permitted capacity of four hundred people. The success of the First Catalan Women's Days was overwhelming. Women came from a dictatorship that had relegated them and aspired to many changes. Furthermore, they went hand in hand with the most diverse social and political sectors. Fifty years after that milestone, the Filmoteca de Catalunya has not wanted to limit itself to an exercise in historical nostalgia, but rather proposes a dialogue between generations and an inspiration to imagine futures. The exhibition Filmic Feminisms 1976-2026, curated by Alexandra Laudo, with the advice of Anna Solà and Marta Selva and the film editing by Pilar Monsell, demonstrates how the camera can break down walls and inspire new futures. It can be visited until November 29.

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There is a before and after the early morning of July 7, 2016. The group rape of an 18-year-old girl by five men in Pamplona, during the Sanfermines, overturned the social perception of sexual violence and transformed the legal system and the way of explaining and understanding machista violence. The aggressors themselves, a group of friends who called themselves "La Manada" (The Pack), recorded the rape images and shared them in a WhatsApp group as if it were the trophy of that night, in a gesture of toxic male complicity.

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There is a long way to go in male-female parity in company management. Half of the population is still underrepresented. But despite still low levels, the situation is slightly better in Catalan family businesses. This is highlighted in a study promoted by the Catalan Association of Family Business (ASCEF), according to which, companies of this type "are clearly more inclusive of women".

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Now that it is the fiftieth anniversary of the historic First Catalan Women's Conferences, there are three ways to remember them: watch the documentary Feminism 76: When our lives changed, produced by RTVE Catalunya; read Feminist Catalonia. May 27-30, 1976, by Isabel Segura; or attend some of the activities that will be held during this month of June at Fabra i Coats under the title Feminisms in revolt. 1976-1926.

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Last week, the program El juicio on La 2 raised an unprecedented debate topic: Should feminism continue to advance? The lever that allowed them to activate this reflection was a question from the CIS in 2024 about the perception of equality policies. 44% of men answered that they believed these policies discriminated against them, and 32.5% of women did too. The origin of the problem is the same in both cases: the legitimacy of an unquestionable social right is shifted to the realm of opinion. It's not that feminism cannot be discussed. Priorities, public policies, or whatever is considered can be debated. The problem is questioning a fundamental right to create a confrontation for the benefit of spectacle. This dramatization of the conflict into a simple for and against presupposes that equality between men and women is negotiable. It is surprising that lawyer Montserrat Nebrera agreed to defend the thesis against the debate question, even though it is known that lawyers defend their clients even when they are guilty.The testimonies from El juicio raised views on feminism that grated. The artist Aldo Comas stated: “Machismo exists, but I don't think it's as big a problem as they make it out to be or as huge a drama”. Social reality is distorted from an individual opinion which, moreover, is a fallacy. That a specific man does not perceive sexism as a serious problem is no proof of its irrelevance. And this is another problem: reflections are incorporated that do not stem from a criterion of expertise but from finding a gentleman who wants to go on television to pontificate.The question “Should feminism continue to advance?” is a symptom of another circumstance. The previous week, El juicio posed: “Is Spain a racist country?” but in no case did they dare to ask: “Should the fight against racism continue to advance?” Not even the CIS dares to ask: “Have anti-racist policies gone too far?” It is difficult to imagine Nebrera taking on the television defense of these theses nor an artist coming out to comment that the problem of racism is being exaggerated and that there are other priorities. El juicio would also not have the guts to debate whether the rights of LGBTI people should continue to advance or whether the integration of people with disabilities should continue to advance. The popular trial ended with 9 votes in favor and none against. What a coincidence. In the end, everyone comes out looking great and progressive.There are questions that cause debate to cease being a tool for reflection. What they do is take advantage of a social issue to make noise and create spectacle. What this approach demonstrates is that women's rights can still be questioned and put to debate. That is why feminism needs to advance. Because public television still allows itself the right to propose debates of a fundamentally sexist nature.

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On Tuesday, June 2, the presenter of the TVE program Al cielo con ella, Henar Álvarez, starred in an unusual scene that soon went viral. During her usual opening monologue, she complained that not a week goes by without some viewer asking her why she presents the program "dressed as a man". The question is not anecdotal.

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The Association for the Promotion of the Francesca Bonnemaison Women's Cultural Centre (la Bonne), a meeting, exchange, and creation space for feminist cultural projects that brings together more than a hundred women's collectives, has been fighting with the Diputació de Barcelona for over ten years to continue in the Francesca Bonnemaison building, on Sant Pere Més Baix street in Barcelona. The latest step has been to formally request the reversal of the property from the president of the Diputació, Lluïsa Moret, based on the democratic memory law. The argument is that in 1941, in the midst of the post-war context, a deed of assignment was signed to the Diputació which the association calls a "true spoliation". it has been more than ten years that it has been battling with the Barcelona Provincial CouncilFrancesca Bonnemaison (1872-1949) was a right-wing, Catholic woman from a good family who did something very audacious that still endures today: she created Europe's first women's library, the Popular Library for Women, in 1909. She offered women a place to train, and at that time it was so exceptional that, when the Institute of Culture and Popular Library for Women opened on Sant Pere Més Baix street, the police had to go there because the men, unaccustomed to the presence of women in public spaces, were becoming agitated. The Popular Library for Women was born in the upper cloisters of Santa Anna and was inaugurated on March 28, 1909. Since Bonnemaison had very good relations and knew the Barcelona oligarchy, she secured enough funding to move, in 1910, to number 12 Elisabets street, and in 1920 she acquired a larger premises in Sant Pere Més Baix. From 1922 onwards, the Institute of Culture and Popular Library for Women was located there. Even today, the institution occupies this space, which is the old Casa Cordellas mansion.

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I read in ARA an article about nutrition during menopause. Nowadays, many news items of this kind are published. Until not long ago, you could find something about it in the medical advice sections of gossip magazines and in specialized publications for professionals. There wasn't any fiction that touched on it. Now, however, advertisements, podcasts, shows, and monologues talk about it. The other day, a friend and I were saying: "Can you imagine our grandmothers?" There were no lubricants, no estrogens, nor much oily fish here or there available to them. They must have commented at the washhouse that sexual relations hurt them, and they must have been prescribed ointments and potions, just as midwives or older women knew how to "help" with childbirth. I remember a phrase – that I kept for a piece of fiction – from my grandmother, which I now revisit with current eyes, knowing what we know that they didn't know. "It's just that grandpa looked for me until the last day. Until the last day he looked for me."

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This is a somewhat surprising story, especially considering it was written by a woman. I don't know much about Amy Twigg: what the book flap says is all that can be found about her online: that she is English – and seems quite young (her age is not stated anywhere) – that she studied creative writing and that with Rotten Creatures she won the BPA Pitch Prize and caused quite a stir. It is a story that begins in a, let's say, inadvertently routine way. Iris (thirty-two years old) decides to enter a women's commune –the House of the Left— to see if her precarious life reality improves. She does so, attracted by one of the residents in the house, the mysterious Hazel. At the head of the domestic matriarchy is Blythe, a vigorous and decisive woman.The profile of those who were welcomed there can be imagined: “Not all of them were fleeing violence. There were women who came because they were exhausted from the eight-hour workday, from working to pay for a house where they barely lived and from promotions that never came. Women tired of frustrating dates and of heating meals in the microwave, of receiving unsolicited dick pics and of traffic jams. Of fiddling with their keys when they returned home and it was dark, of covering their drink with their hand so that nothing would be put in it, of not drinking a sip because the waiter had given them a bad vibe”.A safe space for women?

So far everything is in order. The House of the Left seems like one of those safe spaces for women, where they can exercise sorority with freedom and joy. But no. What will happen, and is announced in the text almost immediately, is unexpected. We could say that the novel begins like Terra d’elles and ends like The Lord of the Flies. Herland (Herland) is a science fiction utopia by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It deals with a society inhabited solely by women where order, peace, and rationality prevail. This gynaecotopia presents a cooperative collectivity in which competitive relationships have been transformed into relationships of solidarity. Somewhere in South America, three million Amazons live happily in cooperation and communion with nature. They reproduce by parthenogenesis and have managed to conceive only daughters. Their religion is maternal pantheism. A motherhood that is transversal to society, influencing all arts and industries, absolutely protecting all children and providing them with the most perfect care and education. Herland is the second volume of a trilogy and was originally published in 1915. It was translated by Jordi Vidal and published in Catalan in 2002.The Lord of the Flies, in turn,is a more well-known novel. It was published in 1954 by William Golding, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It deals with a group of young British boys stranded on a desert island who try to self-govern with chilling results. It is a fable about the innate drives of violence in the individual that made a fortune (the volume was translated by Manuel de Pedrolo and published in Catalan in 1966).Well then, everything that happens in the supposedly ideal space of the House of the Left will reveal the contradictions of human nature (male and female alike). The love story of Iris with Hazel (the left of the story) will evolve, but so will, for the worse, the relationships between the resident women and Blythe's own moods. The male intervention, however, does not help, but rather precipitates events.Do not reveal anything if I write that things will end badly, as the narrator repeatedly warns us. What seemed like a feminist parable ends up becoming her nemesis. But Amy Tigg's narrative flow flows so smoothly and so well-oiled that we fall into it without realizing it. And so passes the glory of the world (and of women).

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Her hair really catches the eye. She herself admits that she feels observed wherever she goes and that she is tired of being stopped in the street to be asked if they can touch her hair or if they simply touch it without her permission. Isabel Balde, 32, has beautiful afro hair. The kind that's a huge ball of curls. "People are not aware that touching someone's hair is invading personal space," she says, as her hairdresser styles it and she looks proudly in the mirror. It wasn't always like this. She used to hate her hair.

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The ceasefire between the United States and Iran has temporarily halted the escalation, but it leaves a difficult image to ignore. For days and weeks, and also in various scenarios of the Spanish State's political arena, the war was justified in the name of Iranian women. Their oppression, lack of rights, feminist struggle. All presented as a moral reason to bomb the country.

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We read in the ARA about the book by British journalist Ellen AtlantaVirtual Diva(Deusto, 2025), where he criticizes the business ofinfluencers"as a symptom of what millions of girls and women experience today," who "feel compelled" to imitate and admire her content. The publication discusses the model andinfluencerKylie Jenner, who embodies a "patriarchal beauty standard that is becoming increasingly strict, but disguised as female empowerment."

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1. If today is Monday, March 9th, it means there's one year left until International Women's Day. I wonder how we'll get there in 2027 if, locally or globally, we continue to take so many steps backward at such a rapid pace. Equality—if it is true equality, it must be without nuances or footnotes—still seemed a long way off, and suddenly, regression is more than just a palpable threat. It's a stark, bitter, and daily realization that the gains we've made are in danger. The far-right wave sweeping the world and the fundamentalism common in religions rooted centuries ago are striving to subjugate women once again to limits that seemed to have been overcome. Irrelevance, dependence, complementarity transformed into inferiority, being told "don't say much" and "you have an opinion, but not much" are the new social condemnations. This is what Katherine Graham, the editor of the Washington PostWhen her husband made her feel, at all times, like she was the tail of a star. The nucleus of the comet that shone, of course, was him. Always him and only him.

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That we are starting with artificial intelligence using biased algorithms is no secret. The dangers of using AI without regulation have been demonstrated and emphasized, whether for personal purposes, in a company or institution, or, even more alarmingly, for disseminating content on social media. Achieving ethical algorithms, aligned with democratic values ​​and incorporating a gender perspective, is an objective that is being pursued, especially in Europe. Women experts in this field are shedding light on a rapidly advancing technology that seems difficult to control and in which, as in the world of... big tech, There's a lack of women.

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Reviewing the latest Prime Video hits, it's easy to spot a pattern: films for the platform centered on teen love stories are bound to win. The latest example is Tell me in a whisper, a Spanish production about the love triangle between Kamila (Alícia Falcó) and brothers Thiago and Taylor Di Bianco (Fernando Lindez and Diego Vidales), whom the protagonist hadn't seen for seven years. The romantic relationship patterns in this film are toxic, but that doesn't seem to matter to its audience, who have devoured it.

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I've had the opportunity to observe female entrepreneurship both through social research and my own experience. This dual perspective allows me to state quite emphatically that when women become entrepreneurs, they not only create companies, but they also silently challenge the model of leadership and success that we have thus far taken for granted. It's not just about how many companies they run, but about how they design them, what relationships they build, and what kind of impact they seek.

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