Virginia Guzmán Barcos (born 1943) is a Chilean psychologist and sociologist, who was a co-founder of the Flora Tristán Peruvian Women's Center.
Exposed to the writing of Simone de Beauvoir at fifteen, she chose to ignore the stereotypical paths open to women in her era.
The course, taught by Virginia Vargas, included students like Guzmán, Roxana Carrillo, Concepción Dumois, Narda Henríquez [es], Magdalena León de Leal, and others.
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.
[11] 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.
[12] Guzmán has researched how religion and politics are entwined and often take stances opposing sex education and reproductive rights,[13] and how gender inequalities are often reinforced by public policies, in spite of state goals to democratize institutions and processes.