Kelly Nuxoll and I--and some great citizen journalists from Huffpost--have spent the last four days digging through the FEC reports to try to figure out how many women are on Presidential campaigns, how well paid they are, and how many are in Senior Staff positions.

Read the full report here.

Peruse the underlying data here.

I think you'll find the preliminary conclusions interesting. What is especially exciting to me, however, is that the work is not done. We have made available the spreadsheets for others to play with, cross-check our numbers, and add value to our research. You can see our sources of information listed. As we explain in the methodology piece accompanying it, figuring out gender and influence on campaigns is especially tricky because of consulting firms. What does $345,000 to Gremlin Consulting represent? I bet there are those of you out there who know, who can help look over our data, tell us where we got something wrong, and give suggestions on methodology for the future.

Its very exciting to be able to publish a news piece and then, because of the unlimited space of the net, include a methodology piece and the underlying data.

As an aside, it would be really nice if the campaigns would make this information available easily online. It would be a great a first step towards practicing transparency in the Oval Office, and it would probably help the campaigns be aware of trends in their hiring of which they were not aware.

We were tempted to call it "preliminary report," but realized that most daily news is just that--preliminary reports--and its important to have those out there even as the information gets double and triple-checked. This is the first draft--help us make it into a better second one.