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We offer a model of colleague valuation to illuminate the coordination challenges women legislators face. Our model predicts that women members' strategies depend upon whether they value women colleagues as much as men do, or instead value fellow women colleagues more highly. We test these predictions by analyzing leadership PAC campaign contributions U.S. Senators made to incumbent and challenger women during the 105th—108thCongresses. We find that women Senators value fellow incumbent women colleagues less highly than do men Senators, whereas they value women challengers more highly than do men. Attaining a critical mass of women in legislatures is thus not sufficient for creating a successful working environment, but instead creates a coordination problem that supplants the previous token minority problem.

We offer a model of colleague valuation to illuminate the coordination challenges women legislators face. Our model predicts that women members' strategies depend upon whether they value women colleagues as much as men do, or instead value fellow women colleagues more highly. We test these predictions by analyzing leadership PAC campaign contributions U.S. Senators made to incumbent and challenger women during the 105th-108th Congresses. We find that women Senators value fellow incumbent women colleagues less highly than do men Senators, whereas they value women challengers more highly than do men. Attaining a critical mass of women in legislatures is thus not sufficient for creating a successful working environment, but instead creates a coordination problem that supplants the previous token minority problem. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Political scientists are keenly interested in how diversity influences politics, yet we know little about how diverse groups of political actors interact. We advance a unified theory of colleague valuation to address this puzzle. The theory explains how minority group size affects how members of a political organization differentially value majority and minority group colleagues, predicting that the effect of preference divergence on individual‐level colleague valuation is greatest when the minority group is smallest. We test this prediction using member‐to‐member leadership political action committee (PAC) contributions in the U.S. House of Representatives. The results obtain strong, albeit not uniform, support for the theory, demonstrating that the gender gap in colleague valuations declines as preference divergence increases in all but one instance. In contrast to conventional wisdom, the theory and evidence indicate that women serving in the U.S. House of Representatives receive less support from men colleagues as their ranks increase.