Gender and feminist theories, as well as policy proposals from a gender perspective, such as the strategy of gender mainstreaming, have challenged the neutrality of both policy making processes and the outputs resulting of those processes. However, some elements of the policymaking as a process have been more studied and revisited from that gender perspective than others; thus, the articulation of problems as political problems, the agenda setting, and the policy formulation or production have been started to be fruitfully analysed from a gender lens, as the ‘What’s the problem represented to be approach (Bacchi, 1999, 2009) or the policy frame and discursive analysis performed by the MAGEEQ and QUING projects. Others, like evaluation has been less challenged as the implications of what it means to do evaluation from a gender perspective still remain to be thoughtfully explored, and even less applied in practice. Yet, public policy evaluation is a practice, which is in clear expansion nowadays, and its review from a gender perspective is very much needed. In this paper I aim to address questions such as: Which have been the developments in conceiving an evaluation from a gender perspective as the gender mainstreaming strategy suggested? What does it mean and imply? Which are the difficulties and challenges for applying this perspective? Is very different from a ‘regular’ mainstream evaluation? Are terms as ‘feminist evaluation’, ‘gender-sensitive evaluation or evaluation from a gender perspective the same? Are ‘regular’ evaluation practices contributing to make gender ‘invisible’, and if so which practices, methods and processes are being performed in a gender-blind manner? What are the political and methodological implications of evaluation processes from a gender perspective? If we mainstream a gender perspective, it is also possible to mainstream other inequalities and intersectional perspective into evaluation and what does this mean?
