Virginia Guzmán Barcos

Career

During the military dictatorship in Chile, Guzmán went into exile in Lima, Peru. In 1978, while a student at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, she attended the Workshop on women's studies organized by the International Institute of Social Studies of The Hague, through the Peruvian National Institute of Culture. The course, taught by Virginia Vargas, included students like Guzmán, Roxana Carrillo, Concepción Dumois, Narda Henríquez, Magdalena León de Leal, and others. The following year, along with Vargas and others, she founded the Flora Tristán Peruvian Women's Center. The center gave scholars the opportunity to conduct research on women and published their works.

In 1992, Guzmán became affiliated with the Centro de Estudios de la Mujer (CEM, Women's Studies Center) in Santiago, but continued her studies, earning a master's degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in 1996. She became a professor in the social sciences department at the University of Chile in 1997, but after one year began to teach gender studies at the Academy of Christian Humanism University. Since 2002, she has served as the Subdirector of the CEM. She completed her PhD in sociology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2011, with a thesis, Procesos politico – institucionales e igualidad de genero, Chile 1980–2010 (Political-Institutional Processes and Gender Equality, Chile 1980–2010).

In addition to her teaching, Guzmán has been involved in policy development at both the national and international levels. She helped in the planning process for the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women and has worked with various divisions of the United Nations and feminist organizations in developing and analyzing gender policies in Brazil, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela. She served on the constitutional committee as a gender policy advisor to the second administration of President Michelle Bachelet.

Research

Most of Guzmán's works explore social movements and how women can create institutions to change social processes. This often included an analysis of development areas, such as lack of education, poverty, issues of rural women, societal norms of subordination, violence, and others which were targeted by global initiatives and how effective cooperation between women in the Global North and Global South was at making women more visible and in solving socio-economic challenges. Throughout the 1980s, there had been little focus on issues such as family violence in Latin America, and works like Género en el desarrollo: una nueva lectura (Gender in Development: A New Reading, 1991) showed the depth of the problems.

Guzmán has researched how religion and politics are entwined and often take stances opposing sex education and reproductive rights, and how gender inequalities are often reinforced by public policies, in spite of state goals to democratize institutions and processes. In her study, "Reproducción y cambio de las desigualdades de género en contextos de transformaciones societales" ("Reproduction and Change in Inequalities of Gender in Contexts of Societal Transformations", 2018) with Lorena Godoy, Guzmán traced societal attitudes and changes in inequalities in socio-economic and political spheres in Chile over the forty-year period between 1970 and 2010.