The literature on women and politics has identified party competition as one of the key opportunity structures that contribute to women’s recruitment as candidates, and consequently increasing women’s descriptive representation. Scholars have identified that when smaller and more leftist parties adopt gender quotas, they increase their electoral appeal and support. This increase in voter support encourages larger and more conservative parties to follow suit to remain competitive. Therefore, the male party leaders’ assumption that women are ‘risk’ candidates has increasingly shifted to imagining women as political tools to garner voter support. Parties that have evolved out of religious political movements, including Islamist movements, have particularly used this tactic to appear modern, egalitarian, and democratic. Based on extensive field research, this paper discusses the specific ways electoral competition serves as an important opportunity structure for diverse women’s groups in Turkey as they strategize for women’s increased access to political office. I show that Turkey’s strong party structure and electoral system has enabled women activists, both from within and outside of party structures, to pressure party leaders to increase women’s nomination and recruitment. When such women’s organizing led to the adoption and implementation of gender quotas on behalf of a leftist and pro-minority party in Turkey, women activists used this success to pressure larger parties to follow suit to remain competitive. For instance, the gender parity measures of the leftist People’s Democratic Party (HDP) encouraged the conservative ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) to nominate record number of women onto their candidate lists for the June 2015 parliamentary elections. However, based on my field data, I also argue that party competition only goes so far as to guarantee women’s sufficient candidacy. In fact, when competition is intensified between two opposing parties as it occurred in the snap elections of November 2015 in Turkey, leadership of both leftist HDP and rightist AKP notably decreased the percentage of women candidates on their lists. Surprisingly, other parties that did not face such fierce competition increased the rate of their female candidates from June to November’s snap elections to increase their electoral appeal. Through a comparative analysis with major elections in Iran where similar trends are also seen, this paper argues that party leaders are willing to nominate women to increase their electoral appeal. However, when competition intensifies between two parties, women are once again transformed into ‘risk’ candidates in the eyes of male party leaders.