Richard L. Fox and I drew the “candidate eligibility pool” from a national sample of women and men employed in the four professions that most often precede state legislative and congressional candidacies: law, business, education, and politics. In assembling the sample, we created two equal-sized pools of candidates – one female and one male – that held the same professional credentials. Because we wanted to make nuanced statistical comparisons within and between the subgroups of men and women in each profession, we attempted to compile a sample of 900 men and 900 women from each.

We drew the names of lawyers and business leaders from national directories. We obtained a random sample of 1,800 lawyers from the 2001 edition of the Martindale-Hubble Law Directory, which provides the addresses and names of practicing attorneys in all law firms across the country. We stratified the total number of lawyers by sex and in proportion to the total number of law firms listed for each state. We randomly selected 1,800 business leaders from Dun and Bradstreet's Million Dollar Directory, 2000–2001, which lists the top executive officers of more than 160,000 public and private companies in the United States. Again, we stratified by geography and sex and ensured that men and women held comparable positions.