Following the Debré law of 1959, the policy of social advancement concerned the education and training of adults who were already employed. It was originally intended to be carried out by men for men only. Based on archival research, this article shows how in the original implementation of the policy, women were overlooked as possible targets of training. The text then describes the circumstances and events which led to greater focus on women’s social advancement at a national level. The discourse began to change in mid-1966. At that time, women began to acquire a new, although fragile, visibility in terms of adult education. Eventually, however, they were no longer singled out. Instead they were subsumed under the non-gendered category of the “salaried” which became the recipient of new types of training at the beginning of the 1970’s.