Women are underrepresented in politics in most European democracies. There is a substantial literature on the desired, anticipated and actual consequencies of the recent increase in the political representation of women. However, there is little understanding of public attitudes towards female descriptive and substantive representation. Using data from the 87.4 Eurobarometer, combined with country-level characteristics, this paper analyses women and men attitudes towards the political representation of women in the 28 European Union democracies. Our goals are twofold: first, we will determine sex differences in attitudes towards the descriptive representation of women. Second, we will examine women and men differences in attitudes towards the substantive representation of their own sex. Our expectation is that sex differences are conditional upon political ideology and other relevant factors at the individual and country levels, such as the electoral system.