How can gender mainstreaming policy and policymaking foster gender equality? A qualitative systematic review of lessons learned from GM research.

Gender mainstreaming (GM) is the primary global strategy to advance gender equality. Its central aim is to embed a gender perspective across all stages of policymaking so that women and men benefit equally. Yet, for decades, GM research has documented a wide gap between the transformative ambitions of GM and its outcomes, often described in terms of dilution, co-option, or evaporation. Explaining this gap has required sustained engagement with concepts associated with policymaking, making GM a particularly important case for policy-theory analysis. This review examines how feminist policy research and policy process theories have been used to understand why GM falls short of its stated goals.

We conducted a qualitative systematic review of 732 peer-reviewed articles identified through major academic databases. Inclusion was limited to studies that made non-trivial use of policymaking concepts or theories. Using an immersive and inductive synthesis, we analysed how GM research explains key dynamics of policy change.

GM scholarship portrays mainstreaming as a reform agenda embedded in policy instruments and administrative architectures but with a modest impact. Equality commitments are made to fit into different policy sectors, and reporting and audit mechanisms, and filtered through institutional hierarchies. We find limited engagement with policy process theories to explain these dynamics. While agenda-setting, coalition, and diffusion models are occasionally mobilised, most research draws on feminist institutionalist, interpretive, and governmentality approaches to analyse institutional reproduction, epistemic marginalisation, and proceduralisation.

GM scholarship has developed a specialist repertoire of policy process concepts, including evaporation, dilution, and translation, to clarify how normative ambitions are interpreted and reshaped within governance systems. Bringing these insights into dialogue with policy process research would improve policy theory significantly.

Gender mainstreaming means that all government policies should take gender equality into account. Since 1995, when the United Nations and the European Union formally endorsed GM, many governments have adopted rules and tools to ‘mainstream’ gender across policy areas. Gender units, impact assessments, and reporting systems have been established.

Yet a wealth of research shows that GM applications vary and the outcomes are often disappointing. In many cases, equality commitments are translated modestly into administrative routines such as reports, indicators, and training programmes. These measures make gender visible in policy documents, but they do not shift the dial on how decisions are made or resources distributed.

We examined 732 academic studies to understand how gender mainstreaming works in practice and how researchers explain gaps between GM ambitions and outcomes. They describe similar patterns in which gender equality goals are adapted to fit different policy areas, filtered through existing institutional priorities, and shaped by professional cultures and informal rules.

In other words, GM policies are made to fit into existing routines rather than transforming the rules. Gender mainstreaming is not simply a failed reform. It has become part of everyday governance, but in ways that depend on how institutions operate. Studying it helps improve our understanding of how ambitious policy ideas are translated into practice and how they change – or fail to change – the systems they enter.

This GM gap matters, but its importance is not fully recognized in policy process research. Most researchers rely on feminist approaches that focus on institutions, power relations, and administrative practices. Our other reviews of equity research highlighted the high – potential or actual - value of policy process theory applications. Here, we identify the need for mainstream theories to learn from feminist research.