For many, the role of gender bias as the primary factor in the collapse of the Warren candidacy—just like in Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016—is self-evident. “Don’t tell me this isn’t about sexism. I’ve been around too long for that,” the feminist pundit Jessica Valenti wrote. And yet others note that fewer than a quarter of female Democratic voters in Massachusetts voted for Warren in that state’s primary. Had the voters who twice elected the former Harvard Law School professor to the Senate suddenly succumbed to sexism? Even white female college graduates, her strongest demographic, gave her only a narrow plurality of 33 percent to Biden’s 31 percent. Are two-thirds of them in thrall to internalized misogyny—or might other factors have contributed to Warren’s third-place finish in her own state?

Claims of a pervasively bigoted, misogynistic climate—whether toward Warren or Clinton—tend to rest on sweeping but largely unquantifiable and unfalsifiable assertions that female candidates are subjected to resentment and harsh scrutiny in a way that men are not. Attempts to back up these claims with data often reference a 2010 Harvard study that supposedly concluded, as the feminist philosopher Kate Manne summarized in a recent Washington Post essay, that “men who seek power were viewed as stronger and tougher, while power-seeking women provoked feelings of disgust and contempt.”

But what did the Harvard study actually find? The researchers asked 230 American adults (two-thirds of them women) to read a short biography of a fictional state senator identified as “John Burr” or “Ann Burr” and rate him or her on various traits, including toughness and competence. Respondents also rated how much they felt various positive or negative emotions toward Burr. For half of the participants, the biography had additional heavy-handed lines discussing Burr’s reputation for being “ambitious” and having “a strong will to power,” as well as a purported quote from the senator stating that “being hungry” is the key to political success.

The study did find that, with the “power-seeking” cues, the female politician’s ratings became somewhat more negative while those of the male politician improved slightly. On the other hand, neither the media reports nor the authors’ own summary mentioned that without those cues, “Ann” got markedly better ratings than “John” on everything, including strength and toughness. When neither was described as ostentatiously grasping for power, subjects regarded the female Burr more favorably.

And what about the “disgust and contempt” that Manne described? This refers to the study’s measure of what the authors call “moral outrage” toward Senator Burr, based on the participants’ self-reported feelings of disgust, contempt, or anger toward the fictional politician. In the absence of the power-seeking cues, the average moral-outrage score, on a scale of 1 to 7, was 1.23 for the woman and 1.5 for the man; with the cues, it was 1.62 for the woman and 1.45 for the man (a gap that barely reaches statistical significance when individual variation is factored in). In other words, the amount of “moral outrage” subjects felt in every scenario was somewhere between “none” and “very little.”