Studies of women’s representation have often explored the link between women’s descriptive and women’s substantive representation in parliament, analyzing whether female representatives bring a unique – and often feminist – contribution to the representation of women’s interests. Doing so, however, these studies have failed to consider “how women’s substantive representation actually occurs” (Celis & Childs, 2008; Childs & Krook, 2009). Recent studies therefore propose to apply a claim-based framework, leaving open how, why and by whom women’s substantive representation occurs (Celis et al., 2008). In this article, we put this new claim-based approach to the empirical test. More in particular, we consider its added value by studying the variety of claims made about women in the Belgian Chamber of Representatives (1995-2007). We conclude that a claim-based framework indeed brings additional actors and perspectives to the fore, but that there are limits as to which claims are formulated and by whom.