Gender mainstreaming emerged in the 1990s to challenge normative social and political structures and practices by integrating gender into all levels of thinking and decision making. Training is central to processes of gender mainstreaming because it aims to provide the knowledge, awareness, resources, and skills needed to transform hegemonic discourses and empower women to participate more fully in leadership and governance roles. In this article I apply discourses of gender mainstreaming and training to a study of the non-formal education and informal learning of women politicians and aspiring politicians in British Columbia. Findings show current nonpartisan, integrative training processes have value for women as good, liberal adult education and training. However, learning and training both frequently consciously and unconsciously essentialize and re-enforce the status quo, which makes them inadequate to reach the transformative aspirations of gender mainstreaming. Required are practices based in the principles of feminist adult education that challenge the limitations of discourses of equality and meritocracy, render visible biases and stereotyping, destabilize normative political insider identities, and tap into the radical activism so many women bring to the political table.