doi:10.1017/S1743923X0800050

Women’s underrepresentation in American politics is often attributed to relatively low levels of political ambition. Yet scholarship still grapples with a major leak in the pipeline to power: that many qualified and politically ambitious women decide against candidacy. Focusing on women with political ambition, we theorize that at the final stage of candidate emergence, household income, breadwinning responsibilities, and household composition are interlocking obstacles to women’s candidacies. We examine these dynamics through a multimethod design that includes an original survey of women most likely to run for office: alumnae of the largest Democratic campaign training organization in the United States. Although we do not find income effects, we provide evidence that breadwinning—responsibility for a majority of household income—negatively affects women’s ambition, especially for mothers. These findings have important implications for understanding how the political economy of the household affects candidate emergence and descriptive representation in the United States.

At a recent major political science conference, Tamara (not her real name) presented an in-depth qualitative study several years in the making, only to have the panelist speaking after her begin his remarks by saying, "And now back to the hardcore data." By this, he meant quantitative, large-n data, which his work utilized. This moment highlights a series of tensions in our field relating to gender and methodology, and their effects, which this article explores and elucidates.T he state of gender politics in political science is not nearly as "far from ideal" as it once was (Judith Shklar, quoted in Hoffman 1989, 833) but neither is it gender-neutral. The "inhospitable institutional climate" cited in the 2005 American Political Science Association (APSA) Report on the Status of Women in Political Science persists in multiple subtle (and sometimes notso-subtle) ways, as well as in certain spaces (i.e., departments, conferences, and subfields) far more than in others.One of the most obvious areas of gender disproportionality is in the methodology subfield. When areas of the field lag behind in gender integration, it is cause for concern. This is particularly acute for political methodology, however, because it is both a gender-integration laggard and the area of the field that develops the "rules of the game" for good political science. As such, political methodology is not simply a standalone subfield in the discipline; it also informs the work done in most other subfields. The lack of diversity in political methodology, therefore, raises the uncomfortable possibility that some of our "rules of the game" may embed biases based on the relative privilege of those making them.Given the disproportionate focus on and status of highly complex statistical methodology within political science as a whole, the fact that such methodology is far more likely to be the province of men than women is concerning, from both a methodological standpoint and a gendered perspective. As practitioners and critical observers of this discipline, and as methodology instructors ourselves, we are concerned about the increasing status of complex statistical methodology (and the perception that it is somehow "better" than qualitative or far simpler quantitative work) as well as persisting gender disparities in the field-and we see these trends as linked. To be clear, our aim is not to rehash the qualitativeversus-quantitative debate but rather to add a new angle: this cleavage in research methods is not gender-neutral.Anecdotes like Tamara's abound but systematic data on these questions can be difficult to find or collect. Therefore, this article presents a theory based on initial data rather than welltested hypotheses, but these are ideas worthy of discussion and further testing. What systematic data we have found-coupled with useful previous literature and our own experiences-allow us to posit a complex and interactive set of gender-related forces operating within political science and particularly affecting graduate students.Spec...

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