Since its inception in 1999, IGTN has acted strategically in the crossroad of social justice and the advancement of women's human rights as indivisible and intersectional. It envisions gender norms and the economic situation of women as deeply interrelated issues that should be urgently addressed altogether.

The Network's specific gender agenda addresses trade and trade-related issues that are of critical importance to the social and economic rights and empowerment of ordinary women and men, with special attention to the work of social reproduction for which women worldwide are primarily responsible. Social reproduction encompasses all the unpaid and undervalued work that is invisible in mainstream economics and is required to sustain human beings and human communities. Social reproduction - the care economy - is disregarded in trade policy and trade negotiations, but it is the foundation of all productive activity - the cash economy. Socially and culturally constructed gender biases in which the economy is embedded continue to hinder women's access to productive resources, mask the contribution of women to the economy, and erode their human rights and well being. Trade liberalization and intensification have not had a neutral impact on these issues. IGTN advocacy addresses these problems and offers alternative directions for trade policy.

IGTN's Political Agenda is Fourfold:

- Support global and regional economic integration rules and processes that build sustainability of the productive (cash economy) and social reproductive (care economy) work of all people, particularly women; and to oppose all rules and processes that compromise that work;

- Monitor negotiations in order to expose and oppose undemocratic trade rules in the WTO and regional trade fora. IGTN's goal is to reduce the scope of the WTO and all trade agreements to specific trade issues;

- Build alternatives from a feminist perspective;

- Work to achieve just and democratic economic policy domestically and globally.