Women’s political underrepresentation is a global reality, though this reality is even more pronounced in Muslim societies, including in Iran and Turkey. In Iran, the percentage of female parliamentarians has remained marginal, never exceeding 4.5% since the Islamic Revolution, while in Turkey this percentage has never reached 10%. However, such low levels of female representation in formal politics does not infer women’s marginalization from informal political fields in both countries, such as women’s organizing and mobilization at the grassroots levels to address women’s political underrepresentation. In fact, the Turkish and Iranian women’s movements have played a critical role within the past decade as they strategized and campaigned for the adoption of parliamentary gender quotas. One main strategy of these women’s organizations was to take advantage of the political opportunity structures (POS). They aligned themselves strategically with parties or factions that depended on female political involvement in order to increase their political appeal. In turn the women's organizations used their contributions as leverage to demand for more powerful political positions from (or in) these parties. It is the purpose of this paper to juxtapose the demands of domestic women’s movements in Turkey and Iran to increase women’s political representation, with the efforts of the major Turkish parties and Iranian factions, in an attempt to illuminate the strategic interactions between the two groups. This paper argues that although the issue of women’s involvement in formal politics has entered the public discourse in both countries, there is a difference in the nature of the strategic interactions which the two country’s women’s movements utilize to approach the problem. While Turkey has recently made significant steps in enhancing the level of women’s political representation, the political landscape is still marked with major ideological clashes between secular and Islamist parties that continue to place women’s issues at the center of their conflicts. This paper argues that party competition in Turkey provides valuable POS for different women’s groups as they can manipulate political differences to their advantage. Conversely, within the Iranian context, in which factions are less organized, the women’s movement has a longer road ahead of it. Despite the formation of gradual, yet strategic coalitions between Islamist and reformist women’s organizations in demand for adoption of gender quotas at the party level, Iran’s increasingly single-party rule greatly limits the POS available to them.