Gender advance in Venezuela: a two-pronged affair

[Judi Lynn]

Gender advance in Venezuela: a two-pronged affair
George Gabriel

George Gabriel looks at domestic violence, discrimination at work, and the deep moral questioning that grips this society.
13 - 03 - 2009

Though the last decade of Hugo Chávez's "socialist democratic" government has never been far from the media spotlight, key elements of the proclaimed Bolivarian process have been overlooked: chiefly the struggle for female emancipation. Yet these ten years have seen Venezuelan patriarchy increasingly challenged from both above and below, by rising tides of female participation and a new swathe of innovative institutions.

Kristen Sample's overview of women's gains over the past decade in Latin America chronicles the potency of electoral law change for the realisation of effective female representation. This has also had its impact in Venezuela, where party list quotas have largely realised gender parity at the level of state legislature and the number of female mayors tripled to 19% in November's regional elections.

Yet as noted by Sample, such changes cannot alone guarantee equal representation, let alone translate into a broader social equality. She suggests a complementary group of strategies involving all sectors of society is needed to bring about female emancipation. Raquel Barrios, a committed young feminist identifies three key target areas for such strategies in Venezuela: "domestic violence, discrimination at work, and a deep moral questioning" that must come from the whole of society.

The Venezuelan case confirms that such strategies exist in a mutually supportive dialectic. Here, a cycle of legal advances and diverse participatory initiatives taking advantage of newly opened-up political spaces is beginning to make progress in the domestic, economic and cultural spheres prioritised by Barrios.

The 1999 Venezuelan Constitution was the first ever to name all positions in both male and female versions. A more significant first is its recognition of domestic work as productive economic activity in Article 88. Since then, the Chávez government has passed an ever more radical set of laws concerning gender equality, aiming to "strengthen public policies preventing violence against women and eradicate gender discrimination". Having outlawed discrimination comprehensively and categorised 19 types of violence against women, including psychological, these laws have sought to create the institutions necessary to make the rights of women a reality.

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