The central research questions that I wanted to pursue in my dissertation were clear to me early in my graduate school career. I wanted to explore why some groups in the United States were so woefully unrepresented in many of the nation's high-level political offices. In 1991, when I began to think more concretely about my topic, there were only two women serving in the U.S. Senate, and the literature exploring the experiences of women candidates was very limited. Because of the seeming injustice of this situation, I quickly knew I wanted to jump into this area of research to see if I could shed some light on what was causing the enormous discrepancy in the number of men and women being elected to top offices.