Good governance principles are increasingly seen as effective tools to fight against corruption.With the end of the Cold War, they started to appear in anti-corruption strategy papers produced by international and regional organisations including the World Bank, the OECD, and the United Nations. In facilitating the fight against corruption in third countries, the European Union (EU) has also incorporated the good governance principles of participation, accountability, transparency, and rule of law into its policy agenda and developed rather comprehensive tools and incentive mechanisms to encourage countries to enact domestic reforms (Börzel et al., 2008;Soyaltin 2017). Yet, in terms of internal governance transfer, the EU has appeared unwilling to define strict anti-corruption standards for its own member states and institutions (van Hüllen and Börzel, 2015).However, as indicated in the EU Corruption Report of 2014, corruption remains a major issue for people inside the EU (European Commission, 2014). Several EU member states, such as Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Italy even sometimes backslide in terms of fighting corruption and are listed as 'severely corrupt' in Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index.The literature highlights the gap between legal institutions and implementation as the main reason for the ongoing corruption and governance-related problems (see Johnson et al., 2013) and underlines the ineffectiveness of traditional anti-corruption interventions (Mungiu-Pippidi 2015) yet to a great extent fails to bring a gender perspective to tackle with the root causes and informal norms of corruption. To address the gap in the literature, this chapter revisits the theoretical discussion regarding the relationship between gender, good governance, and corruption. We argue that the anti-corruption strategies in the EU lack a definition of good governance from a feminist perspective and thus fail to disrupt informal norms and unequal gendered power relations from infusing into political institutions and feeding corrupt and ill practices (Krook and McNay, 2011). This argument is illustrated by focusing on participation, particularly that of women, as the fundamental principle of good governance in the EU. By bringing evidence from its annual reports on equality between women and men in the EU, EU Gender Equality Strategy, and the statistics database of the European Institute of Gender Equality, we show that the EU's approach to