More women than ever before are being appointed cabinet ministers, yet academic scholarship is making slow progress when it comes to understanding and explaining how and why women reach the executive branch of government. Gender and politics scholarship continues to rely on theories developed to explain women's presence in legislatures while the mainstream executive literature does not subject its categories and approaches to critical gendered analysis. This paper develops an alternative theoretical and methodological approach to account for and evaluate the presence of women in the executive branch. Drawing on institutionalist approaches, our focus is on identifying the rules which shape and determine ministerial opportunities and appointments. Given the relative absence of formal rules concerning cabinets, our primary aim is to capture the informal rules of appointment. Part of a broader project - see genderpower.net - one way we capture these practices and norms is through an analysis of media reports of the period from election day to the announcement of the ministerial line up (speculation) and the two week period following cabinet formation (reaction). The data presented in this paper relates to the speculation phase of the 2013 Australian election. Our analysis identifies a broad repertoire of informal rules which potentially inform decisions about ministerial appointments. These include stability and continuity, expertise and merit, and balancing representational norms such as region, upper and lower house, parties and gender. In this case, it is the norm of stability and continuity from the shadow cabinet to government which trumps all other appointment considerations.