Most Women Have to Be Asked to Run for Office. Not Kirsten Gillibrand.

From a distance, it looked as though Kirsten Gillibrand—who at 42 is now the youngest U.S. senator—had come from nowhere to beat the competition. When Governor David Patterson appointed her to fill Hillary Clinton’s seat, she’d served just one full term in the U.S. House. But her rise was far from accidental. Even when she was toiling as a dime-a-dozen Manhattan attorney, Gillibrand was plotting her own ascent. “She had her eye on the prize, she knew what she wanted, and she got it,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “It’s not the classic women’s story.”

The Tracy Flick type [2], it turns out, is a rarity among female politicians. Indeed, while Gillibrand taps into her maternal side on the campaign trail—talking about the challenges of raising two small boys and pushing for legislation to remove possible carcinogens from baby shampoo—her path into public service looks a lot more like one typically taken by men. Walsh calls it a gendered “self-starter gap”: Women are still more likely to wait to be recruited to enter politics, while the majority of men decide on their own to get on the ballot, according to a recent Rutgers survey of state legislators.

Even well-known female politicians claim they stumbled into public life much the way grunts ended up in Vietnam: They were drafted. In each case there is a critical moment—a stranger whispers in their ear, or a friend convinces them they are needed. Nancy Pelosi, for example, says she only ran after her then-dying predecessor, Sala Burton, begged her to. Sarah Palin’s political career started when she was recruited as a twentysomething to try for a seat on the Wasilla City Council. Even Hillary Clinton says that the turning point in her decision to run for the U.S. Senate came when a young woman whispered “Dare to compete, Mrs. Clinton, dare to compete,” into her ear at a public event honoring girls’ participation in sports.

These are just stories the women tell, of course, but the fact that they choose to present themselves this way is revealing. Partly, it’s a defense against the Tracy Flick attack. “Women get the ‘who does she think she is’ response a lot more than men do,” says Jennifer Lawless, a professor of political science at Brown University. “That socialization figures into how they recall [their decision to run].” Still, it’s far from just an act: As Walsh points out, a majority of female politicians have not strategically plotted their journey to the statehouse or U.S. Congress. “The typical story is, ‘I was living my life, saw a problem, and realized I’d better run for local office to fix it,’” she says.

Gillibrand didn’t need any prodding. “Most women have to be asked to run,” the freshman senator says. “I knew that I didn’t just have to ask [for the opportunity] but also to have a plan to win.” Gillibrand says she knew as an elementary school student (I rechecked my notes) that she wanted to be in public life; watching her grandmother coordinate an army of female campaign volunteers in Albany had inspired her. Shortly out of law school, Gillibrand attempted to land a job in the U.S. Attorney’s office, long a breeding ground for politicos. She was rejected, so instead she combined 80-hour weeks at her firm with fundraising and volunteering for New York Democratic candidates.

That path—mixing a well-paying private sector job with powerhouse behind-the-scenes activism—is a typical combination, says Susan Platt, founder of the Farm Team, an organization that promotes female participation in Virginia politics. But mostly, it’s men, not women, who do it. “Men have traditionally held the higher paying jobs,” Platt explains. “And that means they have the money to write the big checks, and they know other people who can, too.”

Volunteering ultimately provided introductions to power brokers, and Gillibrand made sure she had face-to-face time with men and women who could further her career. As she told the New York Times, she first met her now-mentor, Senator Chuck Schumer [3], by successfully angling to share an elevator ride with him when they were leaving a fundraiser. Cornering then-Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo after he spoke to a women’s political organization Gillibrand sat on the board of provided Gillibrand with her first paid political job; impressed by her resume and moxie, the New York pol hired her as a special counsel the following day.

When she left HUD in 2001, Gillibrand returned to her home state determined to run for office herself. She scoured the New York delegation to identify a GOP politician who might be vulnerable to a challenge and decided to take on Rep. John Sweeney (R-NY), a four-term incumbent. After convincing her husband, a newly minted business school grad, to relocate upstate, Gillibrand turned to Denise King, a county chair in Sweeney’s district whom the aspiring politician had met serving on the board of the Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Committee, a group that supports Democratic female candidates in New York. “When she told me she wanted to run for the House, I said, ‘Gee, Kirsten, don’t you want to start at the local level?’" King recalls. But Gillibrand made a sufficiently convincing case that King strongly endorsed her bid and introduced her to the other party chairs, who rallied behind Gillibrand as well.

Gillibrand understood the bottom line quickly, and without any reservations or shame. “In something like 95 percent of cases,” Gillibrand points out, “the candidate who raises the most money wins.” She outraised her opponent in the final quarters of the race, ultimately pulling in more than $2.5 million, an eye-popping sum for a novice running in a non-urban district. That alone sets Gillibrand apart. Most female candidates rely disproportionately on female donors, who contribute less to campaigns than men.

Then Gillibrand got lucky, with a turn of events that made being female a great asset: The Albany Times-Union reported that Sweeney’s wife [4] had phoned 911 the prior year complaining that her husband was "knocking [her] around”. It was unclear whether the Gillibrand campaign was behind the leak, as Sweeney alleged; regardless, it proved decisive in securing her six-point victory.

Gillibrand didn’t morph into a “wait your turn” personality when she entered the House. In particular, she raised eyebrows when she lobbied to be appointed over more senior legislators for a seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee. Some New York congressional colleagues then actually took to calling her Tracy Flick.

Younger women are now following the Gillibrand paradigm. “You are seeing more of a range,” Walsh explains. “In particular, some younger women coming out of law schools are fast-tracking themselves into politics.” Gillibrand’s former House colleagues Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), for example, first won election to the their state legislatures when they were respectively 30 and 26 years old; both made it to the U.S. Congress before they were 40. Like Gillibrand, neither waited to be tapped for a political career or make any pretext that they were put up to running. “You could say that rather than being selected to run, we ‘self-selected,’” says Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), a three-term incumbent who, as it turns out, served as Gillibrand’s mentor when she first ran for the House.

Some Gillibrand supporters openly speculate that the senator will make a bid for the White House. There are intermediate steps she’d need to take, not least of which is winning reelection to her seat in 2010. But while sharp elbows and open ambition may garner snickers, those qualities are virtual prerequisites to compete for the most prestigious positions in government. Vote for Tracy Flick. She’s “self-selected.”