The central research questions that I wanted to pursue in mydissertation were clear to me early in my graduate school career. Iwanted to explore why some groups in the United States were sowoefully unrepresented in many of the nation's high-level politicaloffices. In 1991, when I began to think more concretely about mytopic, there were only two women serving in the U.S. Senate, and theliterature exploring the experiences of women candidates was verylimited. Because of the seeming injustice of this situation, Iquickly knew I wanted to jump into this area of research to see if Icould shed some light on what was causing the enormous discrepancyin the number of men and women being elected to top offices.