María Ángeles Durán is part of the first Madridian generation of a family from the Extremaduran Sierra de Gata.

[1] Her father was an industrial engineer born in the north of Cáceres who had a career in Madrid, and her mother was from La Granja de San Ildefonso.

Currently, she continues to work at the CSIC's Center for Human and Social Sciences [es] as an ad honorem researcher.

In 2009, she was the promoter of the UNESCO Chair UNITWIN Network in Gender Policies and Equality of Rights Between Women and Men, which she headed from 2010 to 2013.

Durán is a specialist in analyzing the value of unpaid work in developed economies, and in studying to what extent societies' level of well-being would be sustained without these contributions, often invisible and made by women.

[8] They fall within the scope of economic sociology: the value of unpaid work, the social cost of illness, the global need for care and the perception of the body and space of women, the interdependence between life private and public, as well as the situation of social groups that until the beginning of her work had attracted little interest from sociology and economics.

[5] "Women, as a whole, bear the responsibility of their children, the sick, and the old, and also give a large part of their resources to the active population of men so that they are more available for their professional careers."

Mi lucha contra el cáncer, in which she related her experience of six years of struggle to defeat the fear of breast cancer to endure and overcome the disease.

[1] In 2004 the Autonomous University of Madrid instituted the María Ángeles Durán Award for Scientific Innovation in Women's and Gender Studies, given biannually.

[20] Its objectives are to promote the advancement of feminist knowledge, encourage theoretical and methodological creativity, and boost the quality of research to guarantee social change.