This paper deals with differences and changes of self-understandings, scientific ideals and research practices in gender education research in Sweden, with comparisons made to Germany. In the paper we highlight differences in the ways in which gender education research has come to construct its history, its disputes as well as its present and future challenges. The identification and analyses of such differences have the purpose of exposing epistemic and social dynamics involved in the methodological specificities of educational gender research itself. Our focus is the meta-narratives on research identities and methodological innovations. Our research show significant differences in meta-narratives of gender education research in Sweden and Germany, and also important differences between these and the Anglo-American metanarratives that so strongly have dominated the gender and feminist research discourses. Whereas some of these differences can be explained in political terms (as differences in feminism and feminist impact), some can only by explained by differences in the constitution of the discipline (Education/pedagogik) and the ways in which educational research has been institutionalised within it.