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

Background 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. Methods 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. Results 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. Conclusions 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.