A fter fifty years of movement toward so-called free trade in a global market economy, protestors have begun to challenge the rules and decision-making processes of officials operating behind the closed doors of supposedly accountability-based democracies. A broad cross section of social justice advocates has protested a seemingly invisible government that put the profits of capital before the needs of people and place. These protests were quite visible at the Seattle World Trade Organization meetings in late 1999 and at the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF) annual meetings in Washington, D.C., that began April 16, 2000 (known as A16 on global Web sites). More recently, protests occurred in Melbourne and Prague over the same issues. Leading voices in these movements are female, such as those of Vandana Shiva, board member of the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), Lori Wallach of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, and Juliette Beck, once a Public Citizen organizer and currently with Global Exchange. Where is the now-familiar notion of women's in these protests? Nongovernmental organization (NGO), government, and international agency projects and programs often bring these two key words together, but, at its core, empowerment attends to power, and power difference is the basis of unequal gender relations. We challenge the facile use of empowerment language in a world of continuing and profound gender inequality. We also wonder how seriously the global protestors address gender. We engage in conversation below, based on virtual and face-toface conversations among ourselves and with international academic-activists at the International Studies Association meetings over the last three years.