María Ángeles Durán is a specialist on unpaid work analysis and its relationship with the social and economic structure. She has been Full Professor of Sociology and a researcher of The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), where she directed the Department of Socioeconomic Analysis.

The conference she will give at the Universitat will revolve around the social and political conditions of care. As stated by the findings of the years-long research carried out by María Ángeles Durán, there is a double implicit social contract. The first is a latent contract between genres that affects unequal distribution of work between the public and domestic spheres; the second is a intergenerational contract through which, from one generation, services are provided and resources are diverted towards other generations. This second contract gains visibility in the current context of increased demographic ageing. These contracts —of structural character— are undergoing change due to a variety of processes that affect demand, the types of works required, and the social valuing of these: changes in life expectancy, the social organisation of the cycle of life and the demographic structure; in the technification of households, in the availability of work and formal education; in the incorporation of women to paid jobs, the progressive diminishing of the number of housewives, and the externalisation of services out of the household, amongst thers. Also as a reaction to the great discomfort and dissatisfaction that the lack of self-time between those women who see themselves forced to tackle all or most of unpaid work.

Durán has stayed as a researcher at the universities of Cambridge, Río de Janeiro (PUEDO), Washington (Seattle), and at the European Institute of Florence. She was founder of the University Institute of Women’s Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She has been president of the Spanish Federation of Sociology and member of the executive committee of the International Sociological Association. She is currently professor ad honorem of research at The Spanish National Research Council (Centre for Human and Social Sciences).

In 2002, she obtained the National Award for Research in Social, Economic, and Judicial Sciences ‘Pascual Madoz’, and in 2018, the National Award of Sociology and Political Science of the CIS. She has been named honorary doctorate by a variety of Spanish universities, the Universitat de València amongst them. She was the first Spanish woman to obtain a chair in Sociology.