The aim of our article is to study the impact of gender quotas on corporate performance. To this end, we consider laws imposing gender quotas in certain European countries as a quasi-natural experiment. The results of our empirical analysis show that gender quotas reduce companies’ short-term cost of equity, but lower their long-term Tobin’s Q, while having a neutral impact on their short-term and longer-term profitability. Our analysis also supports the argument that policymakers can use a quota system to promote parity on boards of directors without generating negative effects on companies’ short-term performance.