Political equality is one of the core values of democracy, and one facet of this is gender equality. While women are no longer rare in national legislatures and have ascended to leadership positions in many countries, it is still true that most political power is wielded by men. As such, democrats around the world seek to further increase the presence of women in politics. One common strategy is to build incentives into the institutional structure, and Taiwan's electoral system of SNTV with reserved female seats is one such example. There are concerns that this system has not been effective in promoting gender equality. Some worry that it has only created a ”floor effect,” merely guaranteeing a minimum number of women, or, even worse, a ”ceiling effect.” However, there is little empirical evidence supporting these fears. In this paper, we examine city and county council elections from 1998 to 2010, with the electoral district as the unit of analysis. We consider the incentives created by the reserved seat system and look at whether reserved seats have in fact produced (1) more overall female candidate, (2) large parties nominating more female candidates, and (3) more female winners. Finally, we examine a previous reform in the number of quota seats to determine whether (4) increasing the number of reserved seats would increase the number of women elected. In all instances, we find the reserved seat system to be a very powerful spur, and this has important implications for future institutional reforms.