The severe underrepresentation of women in almost all parliaments regularly leads to calls for the introduction of legislative gender quotas. However, such quotas and their institutional design are also subject to intense public debate. Surprisingly, research on citizens' preferences towards legislative gender quotas only have been rarely analyzed so far.This paper thus asks the question of which factors affect public preferences towards gender quotas. We answer this question based on a combination of experimental treatments as well as observational factors included in a large scale survey among 2500 respondents in Germany. We make use of a vignette experiment, where we provide the respondents with a varying degree of information on certain gender-quota related factors. Respondents for example receive information on the impact of the electoral system on the probability of being elected as a candidate or the effect of gender quotas on substantive representation of women. Our findings demonstrate that gender quotas are highly polarized among the public, and that informing respondents about various factors as well as consequences associated with the introduction of gender quotas has no effect on public preferences. In contrast, we find that ideological position and the gender of a respondent are relevant predictors for gender quota support.