This paper reflects on the context within which the struggle for gender justice is played out in the global environment. It provides an analytical frame to explain the core of the tensions between gender justice and other elements of social/economic justice, and the strategic implications of the multiple sites in which gender relations operate. The paper specifically explores the interplay between the feminist agenda for gender justice and neoliberal economic thinking dominated by the Washington Consensus. The author comments on the implications for gender justice of the shift to a unipolar world order, and in particular, the movement from the neoliberal era to the neoconservative one. It draws from the experiences of feminists who engaged in analysis and advocacy while participating in the negotiations of the United Nations conferences of the 1990s. The paper argues that women’s oppression has multiple sites; the struggle for gender justice is often cross-cut in complex ways by the struggles for social or economic justice as illustrated by referring to the struggles for sexual and reproductive rights in a neoliberal economic environment, and how the terrain has altered in the neoconservative-dominated era after 2000; it also argues that alliances, whether with social movements or governments, have been partial and shifting and that progress on women’s human rights has been made and consolidated. The paper concludes that the feminist voice has altered the global discourse in the last two decades. The space provided by the United Nations, for all its limitations and weaknesses, has been invaluable. The author emphasises that to protect the gains made and to promote progressive change, the lessons of the two decades need to be interrogated, assimilated and consolidated, and the space created by the UN for the feminist agenda must be protected and strengthened.