Increasingly, critiques about the gender implications of macro economic policy and the institutions that manifest such policies are being articulated and given some credence (e.g., World Development Report, 1995). As part of this work, feminist organizations are using the rubric of anti-globalization discourse and the anti-globalization movement to frame and channel their endeavors. Feminist activists are using a host of trans- and international spaces to do this work: the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil as well as Social Forums held in other parts of the world, the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, the World Trade Organization, and the myriad of United Nations conferences. Feminist efforts can, in this way, be seen as in line with the political left’s efforts to challenge international economic processes. For feminists however, the language and framework of anti-globalization organizing also provide a way to identify and articulate the impact that neo-liberal economic restructuring has had on women and men by showing that patterns of gender-based inequities are not inevitable, but rather are the product of particular policies and decisions. As this paper will show, feminist activist and scholarly attention to globalization have grown rapidly in a short period of time, but the consequences and efficacy of this trend have been inadequately assessed. The final document of the 1995 United Nations’ IV World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China, for instance, included significant discussion of women’s poverty, labor and gendered economic inequalities, it did not generally frame these issues through a globalization lens. Yet, five years later as the nations of the world reviewed the agreements they had made in Beijing, the discussion of gender and globalization moved to center stage. Indeed, the language on globalization was among that which was most contentiously debated. This paper takes up why this shift has occurred. I examine what the gender/globalization framework means and adds to previous activism to redress gendered economic inequalities and then highlight the political strengths and weaknesses of this conceptual and practical move. The increased use of the globalization framework by women’s organizations around the world has been accompanied by a parallel process in feminist scholarly debates. Along with their activist counterparts, many scholars have adopted the discourse of globalization to frame and explain gender-based patterns of inequality (Mohanty 2003; Tickner 2001; Signs, Summer 2001 [special issue on globalization & gender]). Yet, as this paper will argue, increased attention to the nexus of gender and economic globalization has not always led to clarity about what the concept means or how specifically to take the critiques leveled and transform them into concrete policy changes. In this paper, I develop a framework for understanding how it is that feminist activists are using the globalization framework to articulate their concerns and to organize their work. In so doing, I show that this shift in rhetoric and increased activism can not be expected to automatically result in concrete policy changes. Indeed, simply increasing activism focused on gender and globalization will not, and has not, been enough to result in significant substantive change. Activists and scholars alike will have to focus more on the structural or systemic barriers to efficacy if such activism is going to articulate viable alternatives to the dominant neo-liberal globalization paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]