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.

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She specializes in sociocultural history and women's and gender history in the modern age, more specifically in the eighteenth century. Se has worked, among other fields, on gender representations, women's intellectual practices, the notions of the self and intimacy, politeness, conduct and medical literature, and cultural transfer (travel, translations).   She has published several books:  Mujeres e Ilustración. La construcción de la feminidad en la España del siglo XVIII (1998), Amor, matrimonio y familia (1998, with I. Morant), Antonio Ponz: Viaje fuera de España (2007), La vida y la escritura en el siglo XVIII (2008), Mujeres y hombres en la Historia. Una propuesta pedagógica y docente (2018), Arte y artificio de la vida en común. Los modelos de comportamiento y sus tensiones en el Siglo de las Luces (2019; award of the Spanish Society for Eighteenh-Century Studies to the best monograph published that year), and coedited essay-collections (Historia y cine. La construcción del pasado a través de la ficción, 2015; Educar las costumbres y los sentimientos. Una mirada desde la Historia, 2014; The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment, 2020; European Modernities and he Passionate South, 2023). She has also published numerous essays in academic journals and essay collections in Spain, Britain, France, Italy, the United States and Germany.She has led several research funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science (2005-2018) and and participated in international ones funded by COST, Leverhulme Trust, ANR-DFG, PAPIIT, Welcome Trust. She is at present principal investigator of CIRGEN: Circulating Gender in the Global Enlightenment: Ideas, Networks, Agencies, financiado por el European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant 2017, 787015, 2019-2024) (https://cirgen.eu).

She has been Vicepresident of the Fundación Española de Historia Moderna (FEHM) and member of the Board of the Asociación Española de Investigación de Historia de las Mujeres (AEIHM). She serves as external expert for the European Research Council, COST, and the Spanish Research Agencies AEI, DEVA and AGAUR.

As far as teaching innovation and social outreach are concerned, she has participated in many pedagogic and popularised publications (the most recent, El lugar de las mujeres en la Historia, 2023, and Women in the History of Science), as well as taken part in the teams that have developped the historical app for mobile devices Hidden Cities and the play La Farsa de les Germanies.

[Biography, english version]

[Biography, english version]

Marcela Jabbaz Churba, PhD in Sociology from the University of Valencia. She was a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET) in Argentina, director of the Centre for Organizational Studies at the University of Buenos Aires and Lecturer in the same university.

She has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses at different universities in Argentina. Since December 2010 she is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Valencia in the areas of Research Methodology and Sociology of Gender. She also teaches in-service training courses on Inclusion of Gender Perspective in Public Administration  to civil servants of different departments.

Her lines of research and her scientific production are related to gender studies (gender gaps, divorce and child custody, equality policies) and intercultural diversity. As a feminist activist, she is member of the Federación de Mujeres Progresistas.  

Some recent publications are:

Jabbaz Churba, Marcela; Inés Soler Julve; Mónica Gil Junquero y Beatriz Belando Garín (2023). Informes d’impacte de gènere en la normativa universitària: guia de recomanacions i bones pràctiques en les universitats de la Xarxa Vives. Xarxa Vives d’Unitversitats: Universitat Jaume I.

Lozano, Claudia y Marcela Jabbaz Churba (2023). La decisión de emigrar o retornar: La percepción de las diferencias entre sistemas científicos en trayectorias científicas internacionales. Revista Iberoamericana De Ciencia, Tecnología Y Sociedad. Retrieved from https://ojs.revistacts.net/index.php/CTS/article/view/529

Jabbaz Churba, Marcela (2023). Las políticas de igualdad en la Unión Europea: Fases, perspectivas y agenda, en Bar Cendón, Antonio; Martínez López-Sáez, Mónica (coord.), La Unión Europea ante la crisis: Derechos, valores, seguridad y defensa. Madrid: Aranzadi.

Jabbaz Churba, Marcela (2023). Brecha salarial de género en la Universitat de València /2021. https://www.uv.es/igualtat/webnova2014/INFORME_BSG.pdf ISBN 978-84-09-50315-5.

Jabbaz Churba, Marcela; Mónica Gil Junquero e Inés Soler Julve (2022). Informes de impacto de género en la normativa universitaria. Herramientas y estrategia para su implementación en la Universitat de València. ISBN 978-84-09-46756-3 https://www.uv.es/igualtat/webnova2014/Guia_EIG.pdf

Jabbaz Churba, Marcela y Juan Antonio Rodríguez-del-Pino (2022). A visceral method to study gender-based violence among youth. Analise Social, 243, LVII (2), 232 - 255. https://doi.org/10.31447/AS00032573.2022243.02

Rodríguez del Pino, Juan A. y Marcela Jabbaz Churba (2022). Deconstruyendo machos, construyendo personas. Relatos de la masculinidad hegemónica en España, Revista de Estudios Sociales, 79, 108-124. https://doi.org/10.7440/res79.2022.07

Soronellas Masdeu, Montserrat; Carmen Gregorio Gil y Marcela Jabbaz Churba (2022). ¡Apáñatelas como puedas! Dilemas morales en el cuidado familiar de personas dependientes durante la pandemia. Disparidades, Revista de Antropología, 77, 1–9, DOI: https://doi.org/10.3989/dra.2022.001b

Soronellas, Montserrat y Marcela Jabbaz (2022). Cuidadoras familiares frente al shock pandémico (pp. 93-145). En Dolors Comas-d'Argemir y Silvia Bofill-Poch (eds) Cuidar a mayores y dependientes en tiempos de la covid-19, Valencia(Espanya): Tirant Lo Blanch

Jabbaz Churba, Marcela (2021). Custody and Care of Children in Spain: Can the Two Rights be Reconciled? Feminist Legal Studies, 29, Springer-Nature, 351-373. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-021-09466-2

Samper Gras, Teresa; Marcela Jabbaz; Sergio Tomás y Andrea Ferrer (2021). ¡No son las criaturas, es la academia! Brechas salariales de género y carrera investigadora en la universidad. Asparkía. Investigación feminista 39, 165-184

Jabbaz Churba, Marcela (2021). Infancia alterada en pleitos por la custodia de menores. Áreas. Revista Internacional de Ciencias Sociales, 42, 39-50.

Jabbaz Churba, Marcela (2021). ¿Participa el funcionariado de las políticas de igualdad? La importancia de su implicación en los informes de impacto de género. En Juan A. Rodríguez del Pino y María Angeles Abellán (eds). Participación y sostenibilidad en la sociedad valenciana, Valencia: Tirant lo Blanch.

Jabbaz Churba, Marcela y Capitolina Díaz Martínez (2020). Menores en disputa. Custodia, visitas y patria potestad en la Comunidad Valenciana. Valencia: Tirant lo Blanch, 220 p.

Marcela Jabbaz Churba; Teresa Samper-Gras y Capitolina Díaz Martínez (2019). La brecha salarial de género en las instituciones científicas. Estudio de caso. Convergencia, Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 80, 1-27.

Marcela Jabbaz Churba y Capitolina Díaz Martínez (2019). Menores en disputa. Custodia, visitas y patria potestad en la Comunidad Valenciana. Madrid: Tirant lo Blanch

Marcela Jabbaz Churba; Juan Antonio Rodríguez del Pino y Nina Navaja Pertegás (eds) (2019). Miradas de género: Una sociología sin barreras, cerraduras ni cerrojos. Barcelona: Icaria.

Marcela Jabbaz Churba (2019). Gender perceptions and conditioning in the life and career aspirations of young people. The case of Valencia. DG Justice, EU. http://freetochoose.eu/project/coming-out-spain-report/

Marcela Jabbaz Churba y Capitolina Díaz Martínez (2017). La implementación de políticas de igualdad de género en las administraciones públicas. Madrid: Tirant Lo Blanch.

[Biography, english version]

[Biography, english version]