Holding party office matters because it provides different types of resources, such as a sense of belonging and, most crucially, access to information, patronage and recruitment opportunities. All necessary factors for building successful political careers in public office. Several works have noted that party office is unevenly distributed across gender but, to date, most studies have focused on party leaders. Thus leaving unaccounted for both how party members get access to the core top decision-making bodies of the extra-parliamentary party organization; and how gendered dynamics underpin these selection processes. This article fills this gap by investigating both the organisational determinants and the gendered political opportunities shaping women’s access to political parties’ national executive committees (NECs). The empirical analysis builds on a novel dataset on the composition of NECs of all major political parties in Germany, Spain and Portugal. Our results show that, while male-dominance has gradually eroded in NECs –with some parties having already achieved a gender-balanced composition – the selection method in use, the organisational culture and parties’ decision environment still operate in gendered ways.