Leda Perez

Leda Perez is a professor of the Social and Political Science Department at the Universidad del Pacifico in Lima, Peru. Her research in Latin America focuses on the intersection of social and labor rights with gender, ethnicity/race, migration, and class. She is interested in the care economy, paid domestic workers and other gendered labor regimes. Raised in the United States by her Cuban immigrant parents, she has lived in Peru for almost 20 years.

The project

Title: Women, democracy and domestic work in Latin America

"My research on women´s largely precarious labor in Latin America has led me to a more specific interest in the care economy and its potential to improve or decline women´s democratic standing.  In this work I explore women´s overrepresentation in this undervalued sector and interrogate how this linkage – direct or indirect – reinforces the unequal sociopolitical standing of women."

Hosting institution: Sciences Po

Selective bibliography

• Pérez, L.M. (under review). A Barometer for Democracy: Social Reproduction, Domestic Work and Women´s Inequality in Latin America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Pérez, L.M & Gandolfi, A (2024). From dead letter to functional policy: Domestic worker rights and “disformality” in Peru. International Labour Review. 163(3).
• Pérez L.M. & Freier, L.F. (2023). Family Bonds: Kinship Reciprocity, Female Teenage Trafficking and Domestic Labor Exploitation in Peru, Journal of Human Trafficking 9(1), pp. 48-62, DOI: 10.1080/23322705.2020.1842638
• Pérez, L.M. (2021) On her shoulders: unpacking domestic work, neo-kinship and social authoritarianism in Peru, Gender, Place & Culture, 28(1), pp. 1-21, DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2019.1708273