Male overrepresentation in Politics is in part thought to be the effect of gender bias in recruitment. I argue that gender bias results from party recruiters' inability to accurately estimate the electoral chances of first-time entrants and their subsequent reliance on crude, past-experience dependent recruitment criteria, which tend to favour male aspirants. At the renomination stage, party recruiters have far more superior, electoral-performance-specific proxies at their discretion which they use to evaluate each aspirant's electability. Women who have succeeded to win a seat in the previous election are no longer subjected to negative bias at this stage. I empirically substantiate these arguments using a panel dataset on Czech national legislators covering the period between 1996 and 2013; treating one's position on the party list as a proxy for how well one fared at the recruitment/renomination process. I find that while women are indeed subjected to negative bias in first-time recruitment, this bias disappears almost entirely at the renomination stage.
