  A key question in understanding the structure of nucleons involves the role
of sea quarks in their ground state electromagnetic properties such as charge
and magnetism. Parity-violating electron scattering, when combined with
determination of nucleon electromagnetic form factors from parity-conserving
e-N scattering, provides another degree of freedom to separately determine the
up, down and strange quark contributions to nucleon electromagnetic structure.
Strange quarks are unique in that they are exclusively in the nucleon's sea. A
program of experiments using parity violating electron scattering has been
underway for approximately a decade, and results are beginning to emerge. This
paper is a brief overview of the various experiments and their results to date
along with a short-term outlook of what can be anticipated from experiments in
the next few years.
