As Islamists engage in ideological moderation, they tend to move away from doctrinaire positions on the economy and foreign policy. Even a cursory examination reveals evidence of the Islamist transformation: Many Islamist groups that previously criticized elections are now interested in electoral participation, and some groups have already adopted certain aspects of neoliberal economic policies and moved away from their earlier anti-capitalist rhetoric. However, this moderation is less apparent with respect to issues regarding women. What explains this variation? By examining four case studies, namely the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi) of Turkey, Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslumiin-MB) of Egypt, The Islamic Action Front of Jordan (Jabhat Al-Amal Al-Islami-IAF), and the Justice and Development Party of Morocco [Hizb al-Adala wa al-Tanmiyya-MJDP], this essay has two principal objectives: to explain why Islamist groups have characteristically resisted moderation concerning gender, and to account for the variations among the four cases. Two explanations for the resilience of gender dominate the existing literature: Those based on the assertion that Islam is inherently gender-biased (Inglehart and Norris 2003; Landes and Landes 2001) and those that reject the notion of ideological moderation, implying that Islamists have not really changed but have only strategically adopted the appearance of moderation (Kramer 1997; Tibi 2009). Dissatisfied with the existing explanations, this essay applies an alternative conceptual framework, historical institutionalism, and employs the method of process tracing. It argues that the Islamist resilience to moderation concerning gender has roots in historical, strategic and institutional factors. Sources: Inglehart, Ronald and Pippa Norris, “The True Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Policy 135 (2003): 64-5. Landes, David S. and Richard A. Landes, “Girl Power: Do Fundamentalists Fear Our Women?” New Republic. (8 October 2001): 20-2. Kramer, Martin. “The Mismeasure of Political Islam,” in Martin Kramer (ed.), The Islamism Debate (Tel Aviv: the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, 1997), pp.161-73. Tibi, Bassam, “Islamists Approach Europe: Turkey’s Islamist Danger,” Middle East Quarterly (2009): 35-54.