Research has shown that teaching gender theories tends to be an educational challenge and elicits student resistance.However, little is known about students’ learning processes in social science. This study aims to explore these learningprocesses by drawing on feminist pedagogy and conceptual change theory. The results show that when students areasked to perform analysis from a structural gender perspective, they recurrently introduce other explanatoryframeworks based on non‐structural understandings. The students’ learning processes involve reformulatingquestions and making interpretations based on liberal understandings of power, freedom of choice and equality. Weargue that this process is due to the hegemonic position of the liberal paradigm as well as to the dominant ideas aboutscience. Clarifying the underlying presumptions of a liberal perspective and a structural perspective may help studentsto recognise applied premises and enable them to distinguish relevant explanations.