Catalina Wainerman

Catalina Haydée Wainerman was born in Buenos Aires on 6 July 1933. According to Spanish Wikipedia, her father was Russian and her mother Argentine, and she had two sisters. She attended primary and secondary school at the Escuela Normal No. 9 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, graduating as a primary teacher in 1951.

She began studying architecture at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism of the University of Buenos Aires, but after three and a half years she changed course and in 1957 joined the sociology degree that had just been created in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. There she studied with the Italian sociologist Gino Germani, whom she considered her teacher for the rest of her life. She graduated in 1962 as part of the first cohort of sociologists trained at the UBA.

In 1964 she won a CONICET fellowship for postgraduate study at Cornell University in the United States under Rose K. Goldsen. She earned a master's degree in sociology there in 1966 and later a doctorate, completed in 1971 after her return to Buenos Aires. Her thesis, on sociolinguistics, was published in 1976 as Sociolingüística de la forma pronominal.

Before leaving for Cornell, Wainerman took part in empirical research projects on education, family and social class with the researcher Ana María Eichelbaum de Babini. On her return she became an associate researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, where she worked from 1967 to 1974.

In 1974 she and a group of colleagues, among them Zulma Recchini de Lattes, Alfredo Lattes, Edith Pantelides and Ruth Sautu, founded the Centro de Estudios de Población (CENEP). It became a key institution of Argentine social science and a refuge for academic work during the last military dictatorship. She worked there for about 30 years and was its director from 1981 to 1983. She joined CONICET's research career, according to CONICET in 1985, and ended it as a principal researcher. At IDES she sat on the board, taught postgraduate courses and in the early 1990s began a series of meetings on the practice of research.

Her research centred on gender, family and work. The project she began in the early 1970s with Ruth Sautu and Zulma Recchini de Lattes opened a largely unexplored field in Argentine academia. She and colleagues showed that conceptual and technical biases in census questions undercounted women's participation in the labour market, and the new method she developed and tested was adopted by INDEC for the 1991 population census and remained in use. Her research also examined labour and civil law, the family and schooling, themes that echoed changes in her own life and society.

She taught research methodology at many universities. With Ruth Sautu she compiled La trastienda de la investigación, which became required reading in social research methods courses, and her later book En estado de tesis offered practical guidance on preparing a doctoral thesis proposal. In the early 2000s, invited by Silvina Gvirtz, she designed and launched the Doctorate in Education at the School of Education of the Universidad de San Andrés, which she directed, and she was named Professor Emerita there in 2015. In her last years she also worked on researcher training at the Universidad Nacional de Río Negro.

Wainerman had a daughter, María, and a grandson, Agustín, who published a death notice in La Nación remembering her with infinite love. Colleagues at the Universidad de San Andrés recalled her sharp sense of humour, her gift for telling anecdotes, the affectionate nicknames she used for younger researchers and her memorable phrases about looking critically at society. Little else about her private life was made public.

Catalina Wainerman died in Buenos Aires on Saturday 31 October 2026, according to the tribute published by the Universidad de San Andrés. Spanish Wikipedia gives the date as 1 November 2026. She was 93. No cause of death was made public.

Her family announced the death in a notice in La Nación on 2 November, and the Universidad de San Andrés community published its own notice on 3 November mourning its Professor Emerita and director of the Doctorate in Education. On 4 November the university published a tribute, El legado de Catalina Wainerman, written with Mercedes Di Virgilio, Lucía Vogelfang and Iván Matovich, and CONICET published a farewell from the sociologist Martín Moreno and researchers at CENEP.

Wainerman is remembered as a pioneer of gender studies in Argentina and as a builder of institutions, above all CENEP, IDES's broader social science programme and the Doctorate in Education at the Universidad de San Andrés. Her work on measuring women's economic activity changed the Argentine census and influenced censuses elsewhere in the region.

Her honours included the distinction of Outstanding Personality in the Social Sciences from the Buenos Aires City Legislature in 2014, the Houssay Prize for career achievement in the social sciences from the national Ministry of Science in 2017, an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Río Negro, and honorary membership of the Asociación de Estudios de Población de la Argentina. Through her methods teaching and thesis workshops she shaped generations of Argentine social scientists.