This study examines how the term 'gender' is framed across European Union's three key bodies: European Parliament, European Commission and European Council during two parliamentary terms (2014–2019 and 2019–2024). Using Word2Vec, combined with UMAP dimensionality reduction and KMeans clustering, the analysis identifies the terms most closely associated with gender, their thematic clusters, and how these change over time. To ensure interpretive depth, computational text analysis is situated within Feminist Standpoint Epistemology, feminist critiques of gendered dualisms and the high-/low-politics dichotomy in International Relations. Findings show that gender-related discourse in the EU is unevenly distributed across institutions, reflecting both the EU's formal competences and entrenched symbolic hierarchies. In the Parliament and Commission, gender is visible but framed primarily through economic and technocratic logics – pay gaps, employment, care, and procedural mainstreaming – while more transformative framings remain limited. By contrast, in the European Council, gender references are almost absent, confined to isolated mentions, underscoring the persistence of epistemic exclusion in masculinized arenas of 'high politics'. In this way, the study demonstrates how computational text analysis, when embedded in feminist theory, can reveal the structural and symbolic power relations that shape EU policy discourse, despite the Union's self-image as a gender equality leader.
Yılmaz et al. (2025) studied this question.