Gender equality is among one of the main purposes pursued by the European Union (EU), and it is uncontested that in European representative democracies, political parties are among the main actors with the power to hinder or promote gender-related issues. Gender issues are multifaceted, and their political salience waxed and waned over time. Yet, we still lack of gender-issues politicisation, and the reasons behind it. In this paper, thus, we provide the first longitudinal and comparative assessment of how political parties engage with gender-related issues, mapping the salience attached to gender-related issues by parties, and their positions on said topics. Based on salience theory, we argue that parties decide strategically whether to emphasize gender-related issues or not. Moreover, beyond mere strategic considerations (related to the vote-, office- and policy-seeking nature of political parties), we assume that the context where parties compete in is an additional, moderating factor affecting the politicisation of gender-related issues. To study these and related research questions and hypotheses, we exploit the data from the Horizon Europe funded UNTWIST project where we code party manifestos from six countries published between 2004 and 2021 according to a novel coding scheme and procedure developed to measure the salience and positioning of parties on gender-related goals, issues and policies. We then we rely on such annotated data for fine-tuning large language models (LLMS) to extend the dataset beyond the national contexts considered.