Conference: "The Importance of Women’s Work: An Approach from Economic History"

Dr. Margarita López Antón is a Lecturer in the Business Department of the Faculty of Economics and Business at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). She teaches undergraduate Business Accounting courses, as well as courses in the Master’s Degree in Economic History (UB–UAB) and in the Master’s Degree in Gender Studies at the University of Zaragoza.

Her research interests focus on gendered concepts of work and women’s occupations in Spain from the 18th to the 20th centuries, with special attention to the recalculation of the female activity rate. She was awarded the Santiago Zapata Research Prize (2022) and completed an academic stay at the University of Cambridge (UK) that same year.

She is a member of the project “The long-term transformation of the occupational structure, Spain 1700–1920. Non-agricultural occupations as a proxy for economic modernization” (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, Ref. PID2021-123863NB-C21, 2022–2025).

Her presentation examines how numerous economic studies have historically overlooked women’s labor (as well as that of children), thereby distorting key indicators such as productivity and economic development. This invisibility largely derives from nineteenth-century official sources shaped by liberal and institutional frameworks that confined women to the domestic sphere while assigning productive labor to men.

Consequently, she emphasizes the importance of alternative primary sources and challenges the conventional narrative portraying women’s entry into the labor market as a recent phenomenon, highlighting that many women have continuously participated in economic life.

• Date: March 17, 2026
• Place: Auditori Vallhonrat, Plaça Montserrat Roig (Rubí)
• Time: 6:00 PM

More information: https://www.rubi.cat/ca/actual...