Gender equality in education has held a prominent position in global policy making over the last decade through international frameworks and declarations such as the Dakar framework of Action on Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This paper draws on interviews conducted with participants who hold a gender brief in international organisations, active in the global Education for All movement. It examines the ways in which global commitments to gender equality in education are being understood in policy and programme work and what this reveals about gender mainstreaming in global education organisations. The MDG framework has been actively used in a number of organisations to leverage action on gender, primarily with regard to improving girls' access to schooling and achieving gender parity--equal numbers of girls and boys in school. This has meant that more substantive understandings of gender, which relate to the experiences of girls and women in and beyond school, often go un-discussed and un-addressed. The need for organisations to develop a more substantive notion of gender equality work linked to activism on women's rights is highlighted as a considerable challenge. This would take gender mainstreaming from a technical exercise to a political contestation with regard to processes of inclusion and exclusion. (Contains 4 notes.)