Fitxa persona

Maria Amparo Ballester Pastor has been a Senior Professor of Labor and Social Security Law at the University of Valencia since 2008 and advisor to the Economic and Social Council of Spain (expert by Government appointment) since 2024. She has been educated at the University of Valencia and Cornell University (United States). She directed the University Institute of Women's Studies (2016-2020) and the Chair of Feminist Economics (2018-2019), at the University of Valencia. She was vice president of EUFEM (University Platform for Feminist and Gender Studies) and co-president of the Equality Commission of the Spanish Association of Labor Law and Social Security (2018 and 2019).

Professor Ballester Pastor has dedicated a good part of her professional career to research on gender discrimination in the workplace and social security, which has been reflected in numerous publications. She has also researched employment discrimination for other reasons (particularly age), conciliation/co-responsibility/working time, rights of migrant workers, fundamental rights in the labor dimension, temporary hiring, social law of the European Union, prevention regulations of occupational risks, and Social Security.

She has carried out several comparative law investigations based on funded stays at foreign universities where she has been a visiting professor, among which Stockholm University can be highlighted (carrying out research funded in 1996 on the reform of the pension system that was later the subject of publication) or Mac Gill University in Montreal (conducting funded research in 2010 on Age and Gender Discrimination that resulted in several publications). She has been the Main Investigator in several competitive research projects, one financed with funds from the European Union (international project 'Culture, custom and gender' 2002-2004). She has been an evaluator of undergraduate and postgraduate university and teaching degrees for the Andalusian Knowledge Agency. She has been an expert in evaluating Legal Sciences teachers for the Spanish Agency of Evaluation -ANECA- (2010-2018) and has been part of various evaluation commissions for research projects in Spain and Chile. She has been an external evaluator for various legal journals and has been part of the scientific committees of many projects, conferences, and seminars.

In the field of knowledge transfer, she has collaborated with different union entities, business organizations, professional associations, local entities, regional administrations, and other types of entities in the transference of research results. She has been part of the teams that have prepared three bills registered in the Congress of Deputies: a bill for equal pay between women and men (registered in October 2017), a bill against precariousness and for employment stability (registered in June 2018) and a bill on co-responsible working time (registered in November 2018).

Outside the strict university environment, her professional activity has had various aspects: She was a substitute Judge of the Superior Court of Justice of the Valencian Community from 1996 to 2015. From 2015 to 2019 she was part of the European Network of Legal Experts in Gender Equality and non-discrimination, an advisory body to the European Commission on gender matters. Between 2020 and 2023 she carried out senior positions in the Ministry of Labor and Social Economy of Spain: From 2020 to 2021 she was the Chief of the Cabinet of the Minister of Labor and Social Economy of Spain. And, from April 2021 to November 2023, she was the Chief of Legal Coordination of the Second Vice President of the Government. During her years of activity in the Ministry of Labor and Social Economy, she participated in the negotiation and preparation of legal regulations, including, among others, RD 901/2020 on equality plans; RD 902/2020 on equal pay; RDL 28/2020, on remote work; RDL 9/2021, known as the "rider" law; or RDL 32/2021 on labor reform.

[Biography, english version]