Sciences Po Welcomes Visiting Faculty Leda Pérez, specialist of women's inequality in Latin America

I was born in New York City and raised in Miami by Cuban immigrants. Given that I am part of the first generation of children of Cubans who settled in the United States following the Cuban Revolution, my experience growing up was very much as part of a subculture of that community in Miami. This was an interesting in terms of navigating the world of my English-speaking school and my Spanish-speaking home. My friends and I developed a special language – Spanglish – to communicate among ourselves. I still use it when I meet people back home! I grew up speaking Spanish – it is the first language I spoke, although English is the language of my education. I also studied French in high school and have taken conversation courses over several years in my adult life. But I am still learning and not as proficient as I would like to be… Perhaps at the end of this semester, I will finally feel comfortable enough to teach a class in French!

For as long as I can remember, I have always been curious about the world beyond my immediate community. I am easily enamored by different people and cultures – thus, I love to travel and learn languages. I think it is also these empathies that later combined with my passion for social justice.

I completed my doctoral studies in the United States at the Graduate School of International Studies of the University of Miami in Interamerican Studies and Comparative Development. In the earlier part of this century, I moved to Peru for personal reasons and have remained there for nearly 20 years! Once settled, the opportunity arose to return to academia. I have been a professor with the Universidad del Pacífico in Lima since 2012 and a member of the Social and Political Science Department since 2017.

I worked for about 15 years as a policy activist around health care access issues, moving the needle on health care reform in the United States (the only industrialised country in the world without a universalised health care system). I led the Miami-based portion of a W.K Kellogg Foundation-funded national project, Community Voices (EN), intended to shore up the lived experiences of people without health insurance as well as to lift up community-based solutions.

In this trajectory, I published with my fellow policy advocates in both academic journals and in policy forums. I eventually moved the local project from its first home at a clinic and homeless shelter, to a public policy think tank. I would like to think that the seeds of President Obama's health care reform in 2010 was informed by our national efforts (as well as so many other projects and organisations across the country, of course).

I am an Associate Professor and teach an introductory course to political science as well as a seminar devoted to women and development. The latter is informed by my research on women in precarious employment in Peru and in Latin America, particularly the work associated to social reproduction, mainly paid domestic work. This research links with my historic interest – and concern - about the drivers of inequality, be it unequal access to health care systems or people's exclusion from basic human and/or citizen rights due to their gender.

Through this work I have been studying paid domestic workers in Peru for the past decade, trying to understand the reasons for this labour sector's continued marginalisation and bringing to light how their rights progress, while challenged at the same time by, on the one hand, a State without the capacity – or will – to enforce these entirely, and social norms, on the other, that continue to sideline these workers. My research has also expanded to the comparative study of the experiences of domestic and care work in other countries of the region. Most recently I have begun to study how emerging care systems are functioning as a possible foundation for improved universalised social protections in Latin America.

I have recently finished writing a book, A Barometer for Democracy: Social Reproduction, Domestic Work, and Women´s Inequality in Latin America, which is finalising its review process under the auspices of Temple University Press. This book is the sum of my research on women's precarious work, primarily in domestic and/or care-related duties and how this, in essence, sets the stage for how women, generally, are positioned in our Latin American societies. That is, women are not only linked to the domestic sphere because of their paid work there, but they are positioned in all that is domestic and care-related because of their gender. And, perhaps more importantly, they are bound to each other. One woman's progress is based on another women's stagnation. If that is the formula, how is it possible for all women to be truly equal partners in our democratic projects? That is my question and concern.

My training is interdisciplinary. The field that I am closest to is political science because of the focus on development and rights in Latin America, but the subject matter that I study, and the literature with which I dialogue, is also related to sociology, feminist economics and gender studies (and increasingly, there is more political science work that examines the questions from a policy perspective). My methods are mostly qualitative: I work with in-depth interviews and focus groups to inform my work. I also use short surveys. I have published papers that are the result of partnerships with other colleagues that have also informed my work through quantitative analyses.

I am thrilled to be visiting Sciences Po and the Centre for Research on Social Inequalities (CRIS). During this semester, I am teaching on the Paris campus of the Undergraduate College a seminar titled “Gendered Inequality in Latin America and Emerging Responses”. I am happy to report that I have 28 students registered for the class. Likewise, CRIS has offered me a space and I am happy to be participating in the weekly research discussions. I hope that we might find some common points of interest that are comparable between Peru and other countries of Latin America and other regions of the world including, of course, France and Europe, especially considering how welfare models have evolved on this side of the Atlantic and elsewhere versus some Latin American countries' current exploration of care systems.

I will be giving a public lecture at the Lavoisier auditorium of Université Paris Cité located rue des Saints-Peres on 22 October at 5 p.m. and another talk about my specific research in Peru at the Latin America and Caribbean Political Observatory (FR) on 24 October at 5:30 p.m. (to be fully confirmed with the promotional flyers that are being prepared!).