How do criminal attacks against politicians affect the composition of the candidate pool? While previous research has shown that female politicians and candidates are more likely to become targets of such attacks, little is known about the consequences for descriptive representation. We propose that the prevalence of political violence on the municipality-level has an unequal deterring effect across genders, with women more likely to abstain from running for office. To test our argument, we draw on a novel data set of crimes against politicians and parties in Germany (2018-2019). Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find a negative relationship between the number of crimes against politicians in a municipality and the share of women on the candidate lists for local elections. In a survey experiment complementing the observational analysis, we find that the deterring effect of priming violence against politicians on willingness to run is stronger among women than among men. Our results show that political violence can increase the gender gap in descriptive political representation.