While early research into election outcomes found that voters were less likely to vote for women candidates, recent accounts suggest that voters do not disproportionately punish women at the ballot box and, instead, may now even harbour a slight preference for women. Given voters no longer seem to hold an outright preference for men or women, we ask: how is gender used as a heuristic in voter decision-making? We aim to discern whether voters support women simply because they are women or because they make gender-based assumptions about women’s policy platforms. To address this, we field a novel experiment where we vary whether respondents are provided with information only about politicians’ descriptive characteristics, substantive issue priorities, or both. Consistent with past work, we find that voters prefer women to men, but that they no longer hold outright gendered preferences once provided with information on politicians’ policy priorities. Our research contributes to understanding how politicians’ descriptive characteristics continue to influence voters’ decisions when electing political representatives.