The paper analyses select examples of gender- marked phrasemes in the Croatian and English language. The paper is mainly based on a corpus collected from different general and phraseological monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. Phrasemes are compared and analysed considering whether they relate to person's appearance, features, conditions, relation to certain phenomena, etc. The aim of the paper is to show the similarities and differences between Croatian and English gender-marked phrasemes which also interprets the phraseme background. Thus, there are two different groups of phrasemes: 1. phrasemes the components and/or meaning of which indicate exclusively one sex and cannot be related to or used for the other sex ; 2. phrasemes the components and/or meaning of which can be related to both sexes. The phrasemes of the first group are often motivated by certain sexual/gender stereotypes. Therefore, i. e. strength and forces are attributed to men (jači spol - the stronger (sterner)sex), while beauty and fragility are attributed to women (ljepši (slabiji) spol – the fairer (weaker, softer) sex). Within these two groups, the particularly interesting examples are those the components of which indicate the female sex, while their meaning indicate the male sex (i. e. trčati za svakom suknjom – chase skirts). The analysis shows that gender-marked phrasemes are mostly motivated by gender stereotypes which is the cause of correspondence between the Croatian and English phrasemes, while the discrepancies reflect the specifics of each language and culture to which it belongs.