In what ways, if at all, does gender influence how likely politicians are to cooperate with interest organizations when the organization’s involvement is either openly disclosed or kept hidden? Previous studies have consistently found that gender is an important factor for understanding corruption, detailing how an increase in the number of women generally correlates with lowered integrity violations, power abuse, and corruption. Yet, to what extent this effect holds for action in the democratic grey zone of corruption, and the theoretical reason for this, remains a largely unexplored topic.  In this article, we address this gap by surveying 1,659 Swedish politicians about their argued willingness to submit a policy-proposal in their own name that they have been given from an interest organization in either a transparent or an untransparent condition. Our findings show that women report to be consistently less willing to submit either kind of motion. Additionally, when inductively exploring the positive and negative reasons politicians bring up, we find that women are more likely to highlight how interest organization brings in inspiration, whereas men emphasize the practical aspects for generating policies of these kinds of cooperation. The results contribute to the litterateur on women, corruption, and transparency by shedding light on the gendered effects of how men and women politicians see cooperation with interest organizations in transparent and untransparent conditions.