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From the presidential level down, men and women who run for political office confront different electoral realities. In her probing study, Navigating Gendered Terrain, Kelly Dittmar investigates how gender influences the campaign strategy and behavior of candidates today. Concurrently, she shows how candidates' strategic and tactical decisions can influence the gendered nature of campaign institutions. Navigating Gendered Terrain addresses how gender is used to shape how campaigns are waged by influencing insider perceptions of and decisions about effective campaign messages, images, and tact

This article analyses publicly reported statements of motivation by non-incumbent women US House candidates in 2018 to assess the role of negative emotions, particularly those cued by catalysing events like the 2016 presidential election, in women candidate emergence. Findings reveal that Democratic non-incumbent women candidates were most likely to describe negative inducements, including feelings of urgency, anger and/or threat, as motivating candidacy, with these emotions slightly more evident in white women's statements. This indicates that women's candidacies can emerge, at least in part, from perceptions that the costs of not running are too high to stay on the sidelines.

The presence of women candidates in both major parties' presidential primaries, including a likely woman Democratic nominee, has increased the attention paid to gender dynamics in the 2016 US presidential election. However, the presumption that previous presidential elections—without female prominent contenders—were gender neutral is false: gender dynamics have been at play in all US presidential elections to date. The nation's top executive office is arguably the most masculine in American politics. Duerst-Lahti (1997) describes the presidency as a gendered space in which masculine norms and images are reified as the ideal, adding, "the masculinist assumption-made-normal is strong and is made even stronger when it goes unnoticed for its gendered aspects" (22). Presidents and presidential contenders, whether male or female, are expected to meet the masculine expectations of the office through words and actions, and those around them—family, spouses, and advisors—often play a role in shaping the degree to which they are successful. In navigating American politics, candidates also face gendered treatment by opponents, voters, and media, reminding us that presidential politics is far from gender neutral. These gender dynamics have been detailed by scholars, particularly in analyses of the presidential candidacies of women (Beail and Longworth 2013; Carlin and Winfrey 2009; Carroll and Dittmar 2009; Dittmar and Carroll 2013; Duerst-Lahti 2013; Falk 2010; Han and Heldman 2007; Heldman, Carroll, and Olson 2005; Lawrence and Rose 2009; McClain, Carter, and Brady 2005). However, the depth and nuance in scholarly analyses are rarely evident in popular dialogue about the ways in which gender shapes presidential elections.

Invite a woman to run for office. Based on findings that women are most responsive to and reliant on encouragement in making the decision to run for office, this invitation refrain is pervasive among those seeking greater gender parity in U.S. politics. For example, in 2007, the Women's Campaign Fund launchedShe Should Run, complete with an online tool that, to date, has been used to ask just under 200,000 women to run for office. In 2014, another organization, Vote Run Lead, adopted a similar strategy, launchingInvitation Nationto send e-invitations to run to nearly 10,000 women within their first year of launching the project. My own organization, the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), has "invited" countless women to run for office through online communications, training programs, and recruitment campaigns and initiatives. While each of these organizations has also sought to provide potential women candidates with training, information, and resources to assist them throughout the recruitment process, our obsession with inviting can constrain a more complex and comprehensive approach to female candidate recruitment in both research and practice.

It was May 2012, and we heard rumblings about a Senate vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill long-sponsored by my boss, Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), that would end pay secrecy, strengthen workers' ability to challenge discrimination, and bring equal pay law into line with other civil rights laws. As the lead sponsor in the House of Representatives, the congresswoman immediately mobilized her staff and advocates to ensure that we did all we could to highlight the importance of the legislation, secure the strongest Senate support possible, and—assuming it would not pass in the current political climate—protect the integrity of the legislation for future Congresses and eventual passage. That is where I came in.