I consider it one of the great fortunes of my professional life to have stumbled upon the legislative studies community. I did not enter graduate school planning to study Congress. Instead, I knew I was interested in quantitative approaches and had some nascent interests in political behavior. In fact, I did not really leave graduate school thinking of myself as a legislative studies scholar (at least not wholly). My dissertation—which later became my first book, Issue Politics in Congress (Sulkin Reference Sulkin2005)—was motivated by a focus on agendas as a linkage between campaigns and governing and by a developing interest in representation and responsiveness. (On the job market, I applied broadly in Congress and institutions as well as in behavior. My position at Illinois actually was advertised as “media and politics” and, at the time, was joint between political science and communication.)

However, in my first year as an assistant professor, I happened to attend the Legislative Studies Section (LSS) business meeting at APSA and was surprised to find that everyone was there, from the senior scholars whose work I greatly admired to the fellow junior faculty I was getting to know as we navigated our early years on the tenure track. It highlighted for me that the subfield was—perhaps more than some others—an actual community, bound by common interests and also a sense of common purpose. From that point on, I began to think of myself and my work as belonging to that group.

Of course, I only had to look around the room at that meeting to see that the community did not include many people like me.^{Footnote 1} Did this matter for my career? Yes and no. There were times in the beginning that it felt somewhat intimidating to be the only woman on a panel or at a talk or at the dinner table. Importantly, though, I have never perceived that I was at a disadvantage in the treatment I received or in the opportunities that came my way. In part, I think this is because this is a subfield that is very focused on the work and where no one gets a free pass. As a result, there is a high bar for everyone. I was lucky to find mentors early on who championed my work and pushed me to make it better.

However, I also owe a debt of gratitude to the women who came before me, some of whom are included in this spotlight and some, perhaps most notably Barbara Sinclair, who are no longer with us. I know that, at least at times, their experiences were quite different than mine have been. They blazed a trail, and the opportunities for women of my generation are due in no small part to their efforts.

One of the questions we were asked to consider for this spotlight was how being a part of a field that is predominantly male has affected our work. Although it is impossible to assess the counterfactual, I do think that one effect is that it has led me to be bolder in my theoretical and empirical claims and to write and present more authoritatively. (However, I admit that I sometimes struggle with giving this advice to women graduate students and junior faculty that I mentor. For example, are claims with fewer qualifications objectively “better” or do we just think they are because that has been the approach that has felt natural to the majority of the field^{Footnote 2} across time? My sense is that it is probably some of both.) Second, I quickly learned to develop a thicker skin (we can be a tough crowd, especially behind the shield of anonymity!) and to get my work out there. At the same time, I have appreciated the efforts of the current and previous editors of Legislative Studies Quarterly to promote a culture of constructive criticism and feedback, and I aim to continue that approach during my own term as Congress editor.

We also were asked to identify any differences that have occurred in the field during our career. I think perhaps the most significant change in my time is that it has become more geographically diffuse. In the late 1990s, when I started graduate school, most young legislative studies scholars were coming out of a few “Congress shops,” but that is no longer the case. This is the result of various factors—for example, it is likely a combination of a few moves by senior scholars; the fact that we no longer need to be down the hall from collaborators to easily communicate with them on a regular basis; more homogeneity in the level of methods training across graduate programs in general; and the broader availability of data and ease in sharing it. This has some downsides, as I know that there is the perception of less cohesiveness and momentum in our research agenda and subfield now than in the recent past. Overall, however, I think it has been a net positive because it has opened up the field to a more heterogeneous set of questions and group of scholars.

Where, then, do we go from here? If, as a field, we are interested in increasing the number of women who specialize in legislative studies and their integration into the community, there are a few areas we could target.

First, we might ask why so few women enter graduate school with interests in Congress in particular and institutions in general. When I was director of graduate studies at Illinois in the early 2010s, I do not think we had a single female prospective student apply with an intent to study legislative politics (even though, for much of that time, we had three women faculty in the department who studied Congress). As a result, none of my four women PhD advisees who wrote dissertations about Congress had interests in the area before they came to the department. From talking to colleagues at other institutions, this seems to be a general pattern.

The exceptions I know in the field all have something in common—they worked as undergraduates with scholars who involved them in research and data collection, and who explicitly encouraged them to consider pursuing a research career in legislative politics. Research on paths to academic careers suggests that this is generally true of all students, regardless of gender, race, or other characteristics. However, that type of mentoring is likely to be particularly important for female students and students of color.

Second, it is useful to consider the dynamics of coauthorship, including how coauthor relationships arise and how we advise graduate students and junior faculty about these collaborations. One advantage of the subfield for scholars at all ranks is that both books and articles are seen as equally legitimate paths to tenure, promotion, and influence in the field. Based on purely anecdotal evidence, for the women of my generation, reputations have largely been built around solo-authored books. However, there seems to be more variation in men’s paths, with some taking this route but others disseminating their work via articles—often as part of small teams of coauthors. Throughout the discipline, coauthorship has become more of a standard path and now enjoys (close to) full acceptance as a venue for developing one’s scholarly reputation. Accordingly, it is important to ensure that men and women have equal opportunity to access networks that lead to coauthorship relationships (especially those that extend beyond adviser–advisee collaborations) and to mentoring about the place of coauthored work.

Third, we might make an effort to broaden the scope of what is considered “legislative studies” or, at least, in greater outreach to those in cognate areas. For faculty and graduate students doing fairly mainstream work about Congress, the fit between their research and the section generally appears obvious. However, there also are many political scientists doing work about legislatures or representation who consider themselves—first and foremost—scholars of state politics, public policy, women and politics, or racial and ethnic politics. That self-identification shapes the APSA sections to which they belong, the journals in which they publish, and the networks that they build. As such, a bigger umbrella can potentially diversify the section on several different fronts.

My association with legislative studies has been a productive and positive one, and I owe much to my mentors and friends, both men and women, who have made it such. I look forward to seeing the direction that our subfield takes and to being a part of it for many years to come.