Leadership, Representation and Gender Justice Women’s Human Rights Organizations Reflect on a Women’s National Legislative Agenda Background This paper takes off from the sharing and insights from two discussion spaces for women’s human rights organizations convened by SARILAYA Inc. and UN Women in December 2019 and January 2020, respectively. The SARILAYA women’s caucus aimed to bring together women’s human rights organizations across sectors to a discussion on common frameworks and effective strategies to engage Congress and other policy-making bodies at the local level, and advance women’s political agenda. The view is dual: advocacy and lobbying can and should happen at the national and local levels of legislation. SARILAYA also recognized the critical importance of political work and lobbying outside of formal legislative bodies – and indeed, there is an urgent call to engage grassroots women to be more visible in the public political sphere. The initiative was supported by the CHRGEWHRC, with a view that a national women’s legislative agenda for the 18th Congress can be drafted as part of the activity’s outputs. The UN Women “conversation”, on the other hand, had a more fluid program as it is part of a scoping activity for framing women’s economic empowerment, whether these are women within the formal or informal economy, engaged paid or unpaid work. As with the SARILAYA caucus, the exchanges also highlighted the role, potentials and challenges of legislative advocacy as a strategy in fulfilling women’s human rights in the country. It should be mentioned at this point, that the paper diverges from its original concept and purpose. From a technical report describing the current national situation of women, and from there, culling out priority legislative measures to advance women’s human rights, it is has emerged from the two discussion spaces as a paper consolidating its key ideas and reflecting on these in relation to legislative advocacy and lobbying, women’s empowerment, and the women’s movement. The paper is divided into three sections which frames the different thoughts of women’s organizations and feminists who participated in the SARILAYA and UN Women activities: analyzing the Filipino women’s situation, women and legislative advocacy, and drafting a national women’s agenda. The main takeaway is the “back-to-(feminist) basics” call to the women’s movement: critical self-examination of its foundations, grounding on women’s realities, and building women’s collectives. Without these, ideas such as empowerment, equality, and gender justice are vulnerable to hollowness, and cooptation by the patriarchal status quo. This is especially true when women engage in the numbers game that is politics and legislative lobby work. There is also the observation that the political legislative space has also contributed to the fragmentation of women when it isolates “women’s issues” from so-called “bigger and more important” national issues.