Conventional wisdom is that women in politics tend to focus more on programmatic policies and less on particularistic policies than their male counterparts. We argue that this relationship may be reversed in the case of political dynasties, where the selection of female successors is heavily associated with the entrenched local power of male predecessors. We explore how gender and legacy connections shape the legislative focus of members of parliament (MPs) in two democracies––Japan and Ireland––using a keyword-assisted topic model applied to millions of speeches. Our analysis reveals that the speeches of female legacy MPs contain, on average, more particularistic content than those of male legacy MPs, and also more closely resemble the representational style of their kin predecessors. These findings highlight how the expected representational outcomes from women’s entry into politics may be conditioned by the pathways they take into power.