Neo-functionalism is, perhaps, one of the most important and at the same time most controversial theories of European integration. Whether one agrees with the basic premise of neo-functionalism or not, it is difficult to deny its seminal position in the literature and our understanding of the process of regional integration. In this paper, neo-functionalism and its successor approaches are put under a gender lens to ask whether these theories can offer insightful observations about the contemporary EU. Drawing on a number of different EU policy areas, it concludes that neo-functionalism is useful in explaining how gender has gotten onto the EU agenda. However, it is unable to understand (or predict) is how and why, these issues, once on the agenda, are so frequently not brought into policy in a meaningful way.
