Welcome Ona, you have been alive for very few days, so few that we haven't even seen each other in person yet, but while you get to know your mother and your father and you all learn what each other is like, I felt like writing to you. You are a girl and you have had the immense fortune of ending up in an open, beautiful, and free family that will allow you to be the girl you want to be. Even so that at some point you might say that you are not sure if you are a girl, a boy, or whatever you feel like. Take advantage of the bonus because it is not always like this. You will see when you start to socialize that there are girls who are saddled with certain colors, certain decorations, certain things that it would not occur to anyone to saddle them with if they weren't a girl. You ask and do. Go for it. And as soon as you can, play whatever you feel like. Don't limit yourself to the typical game of pretending you have a hair salon, a school, a food stall, do it, if you want, but don't hold back, open your mind. Play at being the quantum physicist who finds the formula to shove Donald Trump into a black hole. Or at being the human resources director of a toy multinational who fires all the assholes. These are examples, but for real, don't hold back. I should tell you that the first extracurricular activity you should do is jujitsu, because, I won't lie to you, being a girl, being a woman, is a bit complicated when you go through the world, and self-defense would do you good. But I refuse for you to grow up out of fear. I want you to know that, in this sense, the problem will never be you. The problem will always be the aggressor's. I would advise you to sign up for the "feminist demonstrations" extracurricular, or "feminist organizations", "non-violent feminist guerrillas" or "how to be a feminist president in the 21st century"; it will be much more fun. But there is still time before you have to choose. Meanwhile, you can learn to vomit every time someone you don't know comes up to you and tells you that you are beautiful instead of telling you that you have an alert look or that you seem very clever or that you have very witty comebacks or what strength you have or what loud farts you make. Because Ona, all girls grow up hearing only that we are beautiful and pretty. This is the content of 95% of the praise we receive in childhood. And then, of course, we grow up thinking that this is what we are worth. And no, Ona, no. You are worth it no matter what your body is like, because Ona, you don't have a normative body or a non-normative body, you have the best body, the body that you care about. And when you start to talk, ask them to teach you to say: red flag, heteropatriarchy, emotional responsibility, gender pay gap your father, sorority, and words like that. I insist, you are very lucky, but you also have to know that we are a family that lives in Catalonia (Europe), we have light skin and we don't worry about money and we have access to things that many people don't have. And that it is not the same to be a girl like this, as it is to have darker skin, have less money, etc. Anyway, just so you note it down. I have only seen you for a second in a photo, but I have already realized: you have an alert look and you look like you are going to let out the loudest and most impressive farts in your town. Welcome, Ona, and long live your life and that of all girls!

What if women stopped voting? It has been talked about for a few weeks now: in the United States, there is an ultraconservative movement that advocates for it, wanting to replace the individual vote with a family vote—and we already know how that would end. The invention is called household voting and one of its main defenders is Pastor Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist who advocates for a theocratic transformation of the United States. This is not some freak that no one pays attention to: Wilson was invited by the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, to preach at the Pentagon last February.

Vladimir Putin wants to turn large families into the traditional Russian family. But while only 5% of households are made up of a father, a mother, and three or more children, almost 40% of families are single-parent and, in the vast majority of cases, matriarchal. Katia and Anya – fictitious names to preserve their anonymity –, a mother and daughter aged 45 and 11 respectively, are an example of this archetypal model in a society historically marked by high male mortality, the central role of women in care, and, after the fall of the USSR, by high divorce rates.

She studied journalism but soon continued with anthropology studies that have taken her to Australia, where she has obtained her doctorate, and where she lives and works. Anna Molas (Barcelona, 1991) has turned her doctoral thesis on egg donation in Spain into a book, Taming Egg Donors: The Egg Donation Reproductive Market in Spain (Palgrave, 2025), which raises many questions and calls for rethinking one of the most frequent assisted reproduction techniques. The first time she encountered egg donation was over ten years ago when an advertisement to be an egg donor appeared on a job search portal. "On the one hand, I got angry – I was looking for a job, why was this coming to me? – and, on the other hand, it also generated many questions for me. That lit the fuse".

Fàtima (Tétouan, 34 years old) approaches a group of women while touching her belly. She is six months pregnant. Until now she hadn't had many discomforts – "I was calm," she says as she looks at her belly – but since she arrived in Ceuta things have changed and she feels the baby every day. She threw herself into the sea, with the physical risks that this entails, to flee Morocco, where she does not want to return in any way. We communicate thanks to Jadira, a woman of Moroccan origin who has lived in Ceuta for many years.“Do you have family in Morocco?”

Births in Catalonia rose slightly last year after 17 years of decline. In 2025, 28,019 boys and 26,230 girls were born, a total of 54,249 infants, representing an increase of 0.8% compared to 2024, according to provisional data released this morning by the Institute of Statistics of Catalonia, Idescat. This breaks a downward trend of almost two decades, although the increase is so slight that the crude birth rate remains at 6.7 births per 1,000 inhabitants, the same as in 2024.

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.

When a woman dies during pregnancy or postpartum, we immediately think of hemorrhages, infections, thrombosis, or obstetric complications. But the records from countries with better surveillance systems have made an still uncomfortable cause of maternal death visible: suicide.The MBRRACE-UK report, an international reference in the analysis of maternal mortality in the United Kingdom, is conclusive: between six weeks and one year after pregnancy, suicide is the leading cause of maternal death. If we add deaths related to substance use, the scientific message is clear: mental health, addiction, and social vulnerability are today central determinants of survival for many mothers.In Spain, a pioneering study has published data on this reality for the first time: between 2016 and 2023, thirty women were identified who died by suicide during the first postpartum year, after a birth oran advanced gestational loss. The majority of these deaths occurred beyond the first 42 days. The quarantine is an administrative convention; a postpartum depression, a puerperal psychosis, a situation of gender-based violence, poverty, substance abuse, or lack of support do not disappear because a month and a half has passed since the birth.

June became for me a month filled with fear. Not an abstract fear, but a very physical one, the fear of the street itself; of the road I pass every day, the same route that once felt ordinary, but now raises a single question at every step: will I return home safely today?

May 28th is the World Day for Women's Health. This year, the Catalan Society of Health with a Sex and Gender Perspective, of the Academy of Medical and Health Sciences of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, has coincided its annual conference with it: Healing Gazes. As I head there, a figure I read the other day chills me: in the United States, in 2024, Black women were more than three times more likely to die during childbirth than white women. The African American maternal mortality crisis is difficult to digest, yes, but Dr. Kemi Doll, a gynecological oncologist and equity scientist, proposes a broader perspective. She reminds us that women spend most of their lives not pregnant, and yet, women's healthcare is mainly for reproductive health. And it is precisely in this long journey (from the first menstruation to beyond menopause) where a silenced suffering accumulates: fibroids, underdiagnosed endometriosis, bleeding that leaves anemic women walking around – as if it were normal – and, at the end of the journey, endometrial cancer. The “uterus crisis,” as Doll calls it.What makes the argument powerful is not just the denunciation, but how it strikes at the heart of science itself. The standard protocol for detecting endometrial cancer is based on measuring the thickness of the uterus by ultrasound when bleeding occurs. It sounds objective, neutral, universal. It is not. This method works worse in Black women, who have more and larger fibroids. This fact generates detection errors and, therefore, late diagnoses and, consequently, fewer treatment options. A seemingly impartial algorithm hid a bias built on who had been included (and who not, of course) in the trials that validated it.Here is a lesson that goes far beyond the United States and skin color, and that the Glances that heal workshop highlights. All research that forgets a part of the population ends up producing medicine that fails precisely those who need it most. It is the heart of sex bias in science. For decades, the male body has been the norm and the female body, a little-studied deviation. Women's health has shrunk to mean almost only pregnancy, contraception, and little else, as if the uterus only mattered when gestating.When we talk about "women's health" thinking only of maternity, we leave out chronic diseases that affect millions of people and that carry a historic deficit of funding and research. When public debate reduces contraception to an ideological issue, we forget that many of these medications treat endometriosis or fibroids. Demonizing them has a real health cost.The challenge now is for science not to fall behind or cede ground to disinformation. Because recognizing biases does not weaken rigor; it improves it. And listening to the whole bodies of women, throughout their lives and not just when they are pregnant, is not a concession. It is, simply, doing the job well.

“I have spent forty years performing a script that was not my own.” This is how writer and communicator Sara Codina, author of Neurodivina i punt, summarizes the vital void prior to her autism diagnosis. For decades, Codina carried the guilt of feeling like a “broken neurotypical,” a defective piece unable to understand the rules of the world. This daily theater to fit in makes female autism seem like a statistical rarity when, in reality, it is a condition hidden behind a social and genetic shield.

In Memuro, a small town on the island of Hokkaido, there are Sunday nights when a cafe specializing in French toast relights its lamps when the city is already asleep. Inside, there are no customers looking for a last coffee before going home, but rather mothers in pajamas with crying babies. Some sit in silence while a volunteer takes the child in her arms for a few minutes. Others simply rest lying on mats after hours of sleeplessness. The place reopens at nine in the evening and does not close until six in the morning. It is one of the new yonakigoya, literally houses for night crying.

Josep Maria. This is how opponents of Aliança Catalana sarcastically call a militant or sympathizer of Sílvia Orriols' party. It is an ironic stereotype to describe a profile of a traditional and conservative middle-aged man who used to vote for Convergència and has now switched to Aliança. There are even users on social media who use this name to ridicule the Islamophobic formation, emphasizing the lack of women at their events or stalls. Beyond the sarcasm, the data supports the party's male bias. Only 19% of the party's 2,500 militants are women, meaning fewer than 500, despite it being a new party that continues to grow in membership, and it is the only one, along with the Comuns, that is led by a woman. It is the lowest figure among parties with representation in Parliament, according to data provided by the political forces themselves, at the request of ARA. Vox, the other far-right formation, has a similar problem and only counts on 24.5% women among its membership. Following behind are the PP, with 32.2%; the CUP, with 34.1%; ERC, with 35.15%, and Junts and Comuns, with 40%. The PSC is the most feminized party with 49.1%.The profile of an Aliança militant resembles that of its voter: it is also the party with the fewest female voters. According to the latest poll by the Centre d'Estudis d'Opinió (CEO), published in November, out of every 100 voters of the far-right party, only 39 are women compared to 61 who are men. And this statistic also goes hand in hand with Vox, which has 43% women and 57% men as voters. For their part, the percentage of women who say they will vote for the CUP is 45%, Junts and PP have 48%, while women are the majority among voters for Comuns (52%), ERC (54%), and PSC (56%). This low percentage of women in parties makes it difficult to form lists for municipal elections. This was acknowledged by the mayor of Ripoll during the first municipal convention, held in early February in Ripoll. The party leader admitted the difficulties they face in adapting to electoral regulations, which require the formation of zipper lists with parity between men and women. The law for effective equality between women and men, approved in 2007, establishes that in municipalities with more than 3,000 inhabitants, in each block of five candidates, no sex can have less than 40% of representatives. Thus, for example, among the first five places, there must be a minimum of two men and two women. This balance, which is not subject to whether the mayoral candidate is male or female, means that Aliança is aware that lists may be at risk due to a lack of women. "We will work to reverse this trend," stated the leader of Aliança during the municipal convention with an eye on the next elections. and can aspire to obtain the maximum number of councilors, this lack of women in their ranks also plays a key role.

This week marks four years since Russia's invasion of Ukraine; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues; the internal war in Myanmar has been ongoing since 2021, and so on with at least a dozen other conflicts. And amidst so much bitterness, a scientific article published this year in the International Political Science Review In which Giuditta Fontana, from the University of Birmingham, and colleagues from the same university and the University of Hamburg conclude that, when women participate in peace processes, the probability of the conflict reigniting is reduced by at least 11%, reaching up to 37% when the UN intervenes.

With an already immense and Basque weariness towards the subject, I read that these days Mr. Juanma Bajo Ulloa –a film director who, some time ago, mesmerized me (at fourteen years old I went to the Fantasio cinema three times to see Butterfly wings) but which I later abandoned completely – goes around the world whining and saying that if you're not a woman or don't follow certain rules woke You're in a very difficult position in the film industry. I haven't seen the interview, nor will I: I'm speaking from hearsay. Some have come forward to refute Ulloa's claims with data, especially Javier Zurro: in short, we could say that, in terms of subsidies, there are a few extra points (very few) if some of the main positions are held by a woman. This is a measure that exists to correct the historical and ominous bias that films made by women have suffered. However, Zurro tells us that, despite the very small amount of support women receive, in 2023 only 36.5% of the projects that received funding had exclusively female directors, and in 2022, 37.8%; the same is true for the films in which RTVE invests: between 2020 and 2023, 63.7% had male directors. In other words, we continually hear the annoying refrain about poor men being left out, while the data confirms that men are still the majority in the industry.

Catalonia's oldest university – founded in 1300 as the Estudi General – now has a woman's face. The woman from Lleida. Maria Àngels Balsells Bailón is the first rector of the University of Lleida And one of only three in the entire Catalan university system. She shies away from individual triumphs and attributes it to "a collective advance." "I hope that one day this won't be news and people will simply talk about merit," she says.

Historiography has traditionally argued that guilds were an exclusively male institution. Only men could be members. But new research refutes this. The shopkeepers' and resellers' guild was mixed for 145 years, between 1624 and 1768. There were master resellers, but what prompted the guild to accept them was not ideas we now consider modern or feminist, but rather the need to balance its books. Years later, women were once again barred from membership.

Going to the gym has never been a common habit for all women in Afghanistan. In many remote areas, women do not even know what a gym is. For them, being active means working in the fields, carrying water, or spending long hours doing unpaid labor at home.

In Barcelona in 1761, people wielded a machine gun of whispers. Maria Badia's lawsuit against the Carpenters' Guild and the carpenter Pere Campañà was urban guerrilla warfare. She was a reseller and defended the right to buy and sell pine wood. There was litigation. She wasn't the only one: Isabel Surroca, Gertrudis Rius, Agnès Capella, Teresa Prats, Eulalia Alabern… There were many women. And before. And after. And they weren't there for the chickens. Because they were the ones who ran the restaurant.

Channel 33 has premiered a magnificent documentary series that should not be missed, especially if you lament the scarcity of cultural offerings on television. Draw for change (Draw for changeIt airs Monday nights, but the complete series is available on the 3Cat platform. Each episode is dedicated to a female cartoonist, comic artist, puppeteer, or illustrator from different parts of the world where power has stifled freedom of expression. You'll discover Doaa el-Adl in episode 3, the first woman to win one of Egypt's most prestigious cartooning awards. A courageous cartoonist, highly critical of the political and social context, she uses markers to combat the oppression suffered by women in her country. She has such talent for condensing the most heartbreaking ideas into a single panel that she'll compel you to watch the entire series and meet the other artists. You'll meet Amany al-Ali from Syria, threatened and denigrated for the content of her work; and Mar Maremoto, who uses her drawings to combat gender violence in Mexico and give a voice to the LGBTQ+ community. Also featured are Rachita Taneja, creator of a sharply satirical comic strip that has become very famous in India for its combative spirit; and Victoria Lomasko, a Russian exile, who portrays Putin's state violence through mural art.