She has a family foundation that makes charitable donations, and is consistently challenged about whether she gave official favors to international donors. He's got a family foundation that gave a political donation to a state attorney general who decided not to investigate one of his businesses, and suffers little fallout. She refused to give a press conference for many, many months and got slammed for it. He banned certain news organization from his events and it delighted his supporters. She called some of his supporters a "basket of deplorables" and it was called a "gaffe." He makes insulting comments about various groups of people and gets called a racist, bigot and misogynist.

Is there a double standard at play in the presidential race? Yes, experts and campaign officials vehemently agree. They just can't come to terms on whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is being victimized by it more.

Ask Harry Reid, the outgoing Senate Democratic leader. "You've all been unfair to Hillary... look at Donald Trump at his medical records which are nonexistent," Reid chided reporters at a Capitol Hill news availability. "Take a look at this character that's running for president. He complains about her health. What does he do? He's seventy years old. He's not slim and trim. He brags about eating fast food every day."

Now ask Kellyanne Conway, Trump's campaign manager. For all the criticism about Trump's refusal to release certain financial and medical information, Clinton is "still not transparent. She still just won't open herself up to the press," Conway said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." It is Clinton, Conway said, who "treats the press like second-class citizens."

Both contenders have been criticized for their lack of transparency, with Clinton cast as overly guarded (failing to reveal her pneumonia diagnosis until days afterward, and only after she publicly stumbled) and secretive to the point of criminality (using a private server to send and receive official emails when she was at the State Department). Trump, meanwhile, has released very little about his health status, and has refused to release his tax returns. Both have been criticized for their handling of their respective charities. And both have had their very personalities and temperaments criticized. But the treatment, critics say, has not been equal.

There is no question, experts across the political spectrum say, that Clinton and Trump are being evaluated in different ways. (President Obama, speaking to reporters on his recent trip to Asia, called it "grading on a curve.") But that is in large part, they say, because they are very different candidates – one, a veteran politician who is running a more conventional campaign, and the other, a real estate magnate with no experience in politics whose highly unconventional campaign bears a resemblance to the reality TV shows in which he has starred. So Clinton gets graded according to how well she is following the "rules" of a traditional campaign, while Trump gets judged for simply not running a traditional campaign – a judgment that would be damning, except that it seems to be working pretty well. The candidates are locked in a very tight race nationally as well as in several battleground states.

"A lot of the Clinton complaints are very similar to [those] of [Texas Sen.] Ted Cruz in the primaries – why are you taking this guy seriously? He speaks in very vague language" instead of delivering more typical policy speeches, says Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the conservative Media Research Center. But Trump, after all, did beat 16 other primary contenders, Graham notes, so his candidacy clearly must be taken seriously.

In a traditional campaign season, "the media comes in and says, 'how much money have you raised? What endorsements do you have?'" Graham adds. "So the Clintons come in and say, 'I can't believe you're taking this guy seriously.' Myself, I can't believe the Democratic Party would nominate the wife of an impeached and [temporarily] disbarred president, how can they have any political appeal."

Trump, however, arguably has benefited from not being taken seriously, critics note. He has made so many controversial and insulting comments – everything from criticizing a Gold Star family to suggesting that a Latino judge could not be impartial to saying President Barack Obama was a "founder" of the Islamic State group – that such behavior becomes a new normal, at least for Trump. He so commonly repeats the untrue statement that he was always opposed to the Iraq War that it has simply become part of the Trump persona – one that infuriates his opponents but seems to have no impact on his supporters.

"Part of it has to do with the fact that it's easier to play out the [campaign] narratives," says Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster. "To me, the real source of the double standard is that Hillary Clinton is the object of questions that they would ask of a serious candidate, while Donald Trump is treated almost like a theatrical figure. And that because people don't expect much of him, they don't demand much of him. And that is a grotesque disservice to the public."

Trump indeed puts on a show – and the media responded early on with extensive coverage of his rallies and remarks. That irritated former GOP Secretary of State Colin Powell as long ago as last December, when he complained to CNN's Fareed Zakaria. "It is time to start ignoring him. You guys are playing his game, you are his oxygen," he wrote to the news host in a recently-leaked email.

There's always a double standard when a female candidate is involved, analysts say, because the public, fairly or not, does not have the same expectations of women as they do men.

"Our research has shown consistently that women face a double-bind men don't" when running for office, especially executive office, says Adrienne Kimmell, executive director of the nonpartisan Barbara Lee Family Foundation. While male candidates can simply tell voters what they have done, women have to show it, detailing, for example, how their experience running a small business helped them understand the challenges contractors or entrepreneurs or consumers face.

"There's an assumption that when a man held this job, he did the work he said he did," whereas women run into more skepticism, Kimmell says. The foundation's research finds that while voters see women in general as being more honest and trustworthy, they tend to punish female candidates more when they display dishonesty – or even if there is perceived dishonesty. "They fall from the pedestal and it's very hard to get up," Kimmell says. So Clinton, who consistently gets poor public ratings for her trustworthiness, might suffer more for it than Trump would.

One of the most pervasive double standards women face is that of "likability," Kimmell says. While Americans will vote for a man they think is qualified but whom they do not like, they are far less likely to vote for a woman unless they find her "likable," she says. That's been an ongoing struggle for Clinton, who has openly acknowledged that she does not connect with voters the way Obama or her husband do, and whose 2008 and 2016 campaigns have centered on her experience and knowledge.

It's maddening to Clinton supporters, who look at Trump – a man who has called women "fat pigs" and "slobs," who has mimicked a disabled reporter and talks about himself in hyperbolic, glowing terms – and wonder why it's their candidate who has the "likability" problem. Decades of scrutiny and criticism have made the Democratic candidate even more wary – something that merely exacerbates her challenge in making voters like her.

Clinton has developed a "shield that controls the answers to your questions, and I think she's got to get rid of that and just let her heart speak," says Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. "When she speaks from the heart, it's wonderful. That's what she ought to do – take the shield away."