The adoption of gender mainstreaming by the Colombian state, understood as a policy approach to transform the processes of construction and execution of public policies, with the aim of influencing the institutional designs that distribute resources, material and symbolic, between men and women, has had two consequences. First, it allowed the Colombian state to recognize rural women as a heterogeneous social group, with specific interests in the country's agrarian development; and, second, it facilitated the transformation of public policy designs in the rural sector to the benefit of rural women, at least in a discursive dimension. However, the available evidence shows that the approach is weakly institutionalized, which explains why the process of mainstreaming has been discontinuous and with very timid results.
