The proliferation of international gender based documents, a plethora of gender indicators and the eagerness of states, particularly in the Third World, to ratify these documents as an avenue toward increasing their credibility on the global playing field, make it difficult for issues of women’s empowerment, rights and gender equality to be sidelined from the discursive landscapes of national policy discussions. Yet, how do we account for the fact that twenty-eight years after the First International Year of Women in 1975, women in reality, appear to be under the same and, in many instances greater threat within the planning machinery of these territories? This paper examines the ways in which Trinidadian policy makers and state managers reinforce historical and cultural inequities of gender relations under the rhetorical guise of increasing gender sensitivity and gender awareness. I use the Trinidadian Gender Affairs Division as an entry point to examine the extent to which mainstreaming models all too easily facilitate the contradictory gesture of arguing women’s centrality as a form of hetero-patriarchal resistance within national machinery.