I have often wondered, as a person whose job it is to write about gender, to what extent I have contributed to this problem in my own work — drawing more attention to a candidate’s gender when we know that minority candidates of all types face a near-impossible challenge already. Play up their differences, but not too much — lest that actually reinforce voters’ biases about those differences.

That concern is not for nothing: Research about the corporate world has shown that continually drawing attention to bias can in fact reinforce it.

Of course nobody wants to vote for a candidate they think can’t win. But much of the hesitation around women candidates is not actually whether we think they can win, but what we think others think — and that’s wavering us by proxy.

An Ipsos poll in June 2019 found that 74 percent of Democrats and independents would be comfortable with a woman as president — but only 33 percent believed their neighbors would be. Which would be just fine, if that 74 percent were not influenced by what they believed their neighbors believed. But, of course, they are.

This creates a kind of “electability trap” for female candidates, said Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at Stanford who has studied the problem. If voters believe other people won’t vote for a woman, then they won’t vote for a woman, and so a woman will not win. “The very belief that a woman cannot win has the power to make itself true,” she said.

Cooper and a colleague at Stanford, the sociologist Robb Willer, along with the graduate students Christianne Corbett and Jan Voelkel, recently conducted an experiment to see if they could upend this bias — with encouraging results. They surveyed 3,000 likely Democratic primary voters, who were assigned to read either a short report about the equal viability of female and male candidates, or a generic essay about the electoral process.

Those who read the “equal viability” report — which showed that women have just as good a chance of winning as men — were significantly more likely to say they would vote for Elizabeth Warren or Senator Amy Klobuchar in their state’s upcoming Democratic primary.