Women’s road to parliament has been long and winding. To this day, women are underrepresented in parliaments worldwide, with detrimental consequences for democratic legitimacy and substantive representation. Understanding women’s underrepresentation requires moving beyond voter-based explanations, such as bias against women candidates. We focus on party elites and candidate selection as key factors in explaining the representational gap. Prominent theories propose that party elites assign women to ‘ornamental positions’ in highly competitive districts or low-probability ballot ranks. We provide a uniquely comprehensive test of the ‘ornamental position’ thesis, collecting novel data covering the universe of Danish national election candidacies from the entire postwar era (1945–2022). This extensive dataset allows us to control for party and election-level characteristics. We focus particularly on the 1950s and 1960s, when many parties used de facto closed lists to nominate candidates, giving local party organizations substantial power over seat allocation. Our results show that women candidates run on less favorable positions overall. However, this gap disappears when considering only within-party variation. Instead, women’s disadvantage stems from women running for parties with long lists and low electoral success. We also find that, conditional on candidate performance, parties do not seem to penalize women with less winnable seats in the subsequent election. These results challenge prevailing theories about the role of party elites in hindering women’s political representation.