Teresa Lara Junco, Master of Gender Statistics, Passes Away

January 25, 2023

How much does a woman really work? What contribution do those dedicated to household tasks make to a country's economy? Is the proportion of female heads of households growing? Why?

These and many other questions have been for years at the academic and research focus of economist and feminist Teresa Lara Junco, who died on Tuesday, January 18 in Havana, a victim of cancer.

A pioneer in the production of gender statistics in the country, Lara Junco –or Tere, as colleagues and friends called her– understood very well the need to account for the participation and problems of women.

"I was attracted to the possibility of reflecting, through numbers, realities of the daily life of Cuban women that were not always visible," she said to SEMlac in an interview in 2010.

Born in 1953, she was vice director of the National Office of Statistics of Cuba, advisor to several international organizations such as the United Nations Organization for Food and Agriculture (FAO), Unifem and UN Women. She coordinated research on time use, care as a human right and the statistical measurement of unpaid work in Cuba, to cite just a few examples.

"Those three or four working days that a woman can have are not understood until they are carried out. They are not even understood by the women themselves," Lara confessed in the 2010 dialogue.

Already engaged in the search for indicators that would allow her to evaluate all of this problem, the economist confirmed the need for comparable methodologies that would place women in the social context of their countries and regions.

Female scholars, researchers, institutions and places with which she collaborated throughout her life have expressed on social networks the profound impact of her physical departure, not only on a personal level, but for her essential contributions to data science in the country.

"There are losses that are irreparable, there are people who mark your history, both professional and personal. There are teachers who arrive and remain forever, there are those who, with their work, define the path of a movement, a policy, a country," wrote sociologist Magela Romero Amodóvar, coordinator of the Cuban Network for Studies on Care, on her Facebook profile.

For her part, young journalist Arlette Vasallo García, of the Information System of Cuban Television, thanked the support provided by Lara Junco for a recent professional assignment.

"I just learned of the death of researcher and economist, Teresa Lara. I will always be grateful for the support she provided to me for this journalistic work a few months ago about the vulnerabilities of rural women in Cuba. Cuban feminists and science owe her notable studies for the benefit of Cuban society from a gender perspective," said Vasallo on her profile on the aforementioned social network, where she documented the material.

Lara Junco not only dedicated most of her professional career to building statistics and indicators that would allow measuring changes in gender matters and to the research of feminist economics, but also to overcoming resistance to their generation, use and dissemination.

"Data is one of the most powerful instruments to destroy myths, reveal unknown biases and highlight inequalities based on race, sex, sexual orientation and gender identity, which has created more awareness about its use at the national level," she acknowledged at the end of 2022, during the colloquium Care and Gender Violence, convened by the Cuban Multidisciplinary Society for the Study of Sexuality (Socumes) and the Oscar Arnulfo Romero Center (OAR).

A graduate in Economics from the University of Havana, she participated as a consultant in the design and evaluation of projects with national institutions and international organizations on issues related to gender statistics and indicators.

In 2001 she worked on the methodology, application and analysis of the results of the Survey on Time Use, developed locally in five municipalities of Cuba, and was part of the group of experts on Time Use Surveys of Unifem for Central America, Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

She gave lectures at Universities throughout Iberoamerica and Latin America. Among her publications stand out Women in Transit (2011) and articles included in the books Looking at the Cuban Economy: the process of updating (2012), and Cuban Economy. Essays for a necessary restructuring (2013), the latter recipient of a Prize from the Academy of Sciences of Cuba.

Recently, in 2019, she coordinated the gender chapter of the report Rise to the Root. The Local Perspective of Human Development in Cuba 2019, prepared by the Center for Research on the World Economy (Ciem) and the United Nations Development Program (Undp), in coordination with many other Cuban institutions.