At the Millennium Summit world leaders committed to reducing extreme poverty through a series of targets encompassed within the MDGs, with a deadline of 2015. One of these was to promote gender equality and empower women, and the ‘proportion of seats held by women in national parliament' was set as a key indicator. With the MDG Review Summit meeting in September 2010, this is an opportunity to consider whether the proportion of women in parliament continues to be the most adequate proxy for women's political empowerment. This IDS Bulletin explores what the quota has meant as a motorway to women's accession to political power by drawing on research findings from the Pathways of Women's Empowerment Research Programme Consortium (‘Pathways'), as well as a series of articles from a special seminar in the Brazilian National Congress as part of this programme, and contributions from other country case studies. The aim of the issue is to bring new insights from the programme and beyond to an audience of development academics and policy actors who have become familiar with the proliferation of different forms of affirmative action, but who are interested in interrogating the politics behind the quotas in all their complexity and nuances. It questions motivations behind adopting quotas, discusses different political pathways of breaking through the ceiling for women to reach political office (with or without quotas); and raises questions such as who benefits from the quota as a fast track option, and what kind of gender agendas do the women who have come to power via the quota espouse and advocate?