This journal, Politics & Gender, rests on the presumption that gender, like race, class, and ethnicity, exists as a discrete category of political identity and political analysis. We can learn things about politics, in other words, by focusing on the ways in which the differences between men and women become relevant to politics. Research on gender, like research on race, class, and ethnicity, has earned independent standing within political science. For many scholars, gender constitutes the primary focus of their research. Looking through a gendered lens has given birth to a large body of scholarship. Gender has its own research sections in our professional associations and its own journals. Political scientists can and regularly do consider the effect of gender independently from other variables in their research.