As gender quotas become increasingly popular globally, new rules mandating gender parity in elected bodies are appearing in places that lack other aspects of inclusive democracy. Such is the case with the United Arab Emirates, which implemented gender parity for its advisory body, the Federal National Council, during the 2019 electoral cycle. However, observers have questioned whether and how such top-down reforms relate to citizens preferences. Are quotas merely artifacts of state feminism used to bolster domestic and international support for the regime or are they indicative of a deeper societal shift toward inclusivity? Yet, mapping citizen opinions about female participation in government is not a straightforward task. Prior to the recent entry of women into Gulf politics, long-standing discussions of identity politics centered around mechanisms for sharing power between regional and tribal actors. Thus, support for women in elected institutions is mediated by perceptions of relevant tribal identities, thus necessitating an intersectional approach. Research on the broader Middle East (Bush and Gao 2017, Kao and Benstead 2020) and more recently the Arab Gulf (al-Sharekh, and Freer 2022) has demonstrated the utility of intersectional approaches for understanding the complex relationship between gender and tribal identity. To add further complexity, it is difficult to empirically ascertain public support for women in politics due to the strength of state narratives and social desirability biases favoring female inclusion and discouraging overt discussion of tribal politics. This paper offers exploratory experimental data from UAE nationals enrolled at two prominent universities collected in the spring of 2021. It measures preferences for hypothetical candidates with randomized ascriptive attributes including gender and family names, alongside occupation, experience, education, and issue area. Results show that young males are less likely to support the female candidate overall, but no gender bias exists for female respondents. Furthermore, female candidates from some tribes are less likely to garner public support among young nationals. The paper also investigates how support for female candidates is shaped by different experimental frames, including reminders about the quota law and the presence of women on the council. Frames presenting women as already having an established presence on the council are associated with lower support for female candidates among male participants. Taken together the results are indicative of a society in transition. Despite generally high levels of support for women in politics, tribal identities complicate how female candidates are perceived by young educated nationals.