Development practitioners have tried to make women 'matter' in development. But women-focused approaches have often addressed women's needs outside the wider social contexts in which they live and have been as damaging to women's interests as earlier 'gender-blind' efforts that ignored women's specific concerns altogether. These papers taken from the journal 'Development in Practice', cover topics as diverse as 'mainstreaming' versus specialization, methodologies for introducing gender analysis into planning and evaluation, limitations of gender training and how institutional policies to promote gender enquiry can be tacitly undermined by patriarchal interests.