Quotas for women in politics have been adopted frequently throughout the Arab world in the past decade to compensate for the region’s low levels of women’s political representation. But who are the women that gain office through these quotas? Feminists and others that advocate for gender quotas do so because they believe that having more women in legislatures changes the type of policies that those legislatures enact as well as the way the public perceives women in politics. Yet other observers, including many feminists, worry that quotas may promote the election of “token” women or women who are already connected to elite men (e.g., as members of their tribes or families). Rather than enacting the sort of female-friendly policies that many feminists seek out, such “quota women” may uphold the existing socio-political status quo. This paper weighs in on the debate about quotas in the context of Jordan, which adopted a 20 percent quota for women on its municipal councils in 2007 under heavy international pressure to increase women’s political participation. Using newly collected data on the compositions of Jordan’s municipal councils and the backgrounds of its municipal councilors, this paper explores the effects of Jordan’s gender quota on descriptive representation at the local level. Preliminary analysis suggests that political elites in Jordan use the women’s quota strategically to gain representation on municipal councils, which can be important distributors of clientelistic benefits in Jordan. Indeed, socioeconomic modernization (e.g., levels of urbanization, poverty, and education) does not seem to make municipalities more inclined to vote for women. The paper’s findings give us insight not only into how local politics works in an authoritarian setting but also into the effects of gender quotas in the Middle East.