"Given this persistent gender gap in political ambition, we are a long way from a political reality in which young women and men are equally likely to aspire to seek and hold elective office in the future," the report grimly predicts.

Jennifer Lawless, professor at AU and director of the Women & Politics Institute, finds these results disturbing because she conducted a survey sussing out the likelihood of older women to run for office in 2001 and found similarly weak numbers among women best situated in their careers to run for office. This new research shows that these trends start earlier than she previously thought.

"This is the time that they're considering all of their career options," Lawless said. Yet older women were half as likely as men to think "many times" about running and 20 points more likely to say they had never thought about running for office at all.

"Although we expected to see some degree of a gender gap [with younger people], we certainly thought it would be smaller. The evidence suggests it's just as big," she said.

One group that does have a smaller gap, though, is high school students. Twenty-three percent of girls and boys both ran for high school student government and won at roughly equal rates (15 percent for girls and 14 percent for boys). "If you look at their broad socialization as high school students, there were far fewer gender differences than there were once they reached college. So it seems something is happening once they enter college," Lawless said. "It seems like the key intervention at this point really needs to be on those college campuses because they're more similar before they get there than when they leave."

That intervention could take some deep-seeded cultural change. Lawless' group found a number of factors they felt were holding women back when it came to running for office.

For instance, college-aged men were much more likely to say that a parent had encouraged them to run for office someday; about a third of men said their mom or dad had encouraged them while less than a quarter of women said the same.

Researchers also found men were much likelier to put themselves in politically immersive environments, like getting involved in the College Democrats or College Republicans, reading political news, or even discuss politics with friends.

Meanwhile, what had changed for women in the ten years since Lawless' previous study was female political role models: Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, former Republican presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann, former Democratic presidential candidate and later Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former vice presidential nominee and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin all rose to prominence since 2001. Yet those female role models had virtually no effect on whether women were inclined to run for office.