The nexus between gender equality and institutional development has long been of central importance to feminist studies.This is particularly evident regarding the proliferation of gender machineries and gender mainstreaming across various policy spheres. Although most of the gender machineries started working under the UN gender normative framework, they significantly vary in their capacity and effectiveness to achieve gender equality.This paper starts from the puzzle why the capacity of the gender machineries to translate the process of gender mainstreaming from theory to practice varies greatly across across regions and countries?By applying historical institutionalism approaches in the case of the Philippines – a very interesting outlier in term of gender equality in institutional development – the paper will present how path-dependent processes have shaped the current gender equality results.Early institutional developments – through a chain of causal events - paved the way new gender equality ideas to be inserted in the Philippines.
