Women make up a minority of the top policy makers in both politics and the bureaucracy throughout most modern democracies. While the existing literature mainly investigates causes of women's absence from the top of politics, this paper analyses the other side of the coin, namely women's absence from the top of bureaucracy by studying the career progression of male and female civil servants. We propose that women's career trajectories in the bureaucracy depend on the ideology of the government in office. Female civil servants will have improved career opportunities under left-wing compared to right-wing government coalitions because of 1) ideology and 2) demand for preference alignment in the bureaucracy. We use a data set of all central government employees in Denmark measured quarterly from 1998 to 2019. As the Danish public sector is distinctively non-partisan and holds strong meritocratic norms for bureaucratic promotions, it provides a hard case for testing our propositions. Our results show that female career trajectories in civil service improve under left-wing governments compared to right-wing governments. The effects arise because of a demand for preference alignment and only exists for bureaucratic top positions, where political attention and discretion are strongest. Closer examination reveals the effects are due to general career disadvantages for female civil servants following shifts in government, disadvantages that are smaller if the incoming government is left-wing rather than right-wing. The results highlight some of the barriers for female policy makers’ career progression, but also highlight how partisan politics shape the national civil service.