There is an old quote: “Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.”

It was uttered in 1963 by feminist and politician Charlotte Whitton, the first female mayor of a major Canadian city (Ottawa). Now, Whitton was not without her faults—she was an outspoken and virulently anti-immigrant eugenicist—but the quip, itself, still holds true.

Take 2020 Democratic presidential contender and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. For the first six months of her campaign, Warren seemed stuck in single digits as first choice among Democratic voters for national polling, seemingly bogged down in questions of “likability” and residual sexism.

But there’s been some movement as of late. In Tuesday’s Economist/YouGov poll, Warren just hopped into second place of Democratic primary voters’ first-choice candidate, at 16 percent, behind former vice president Joe Biden and just ahead of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. And in the Monmouth poll for swing-state Nevada, the same: Warren debuted in second place at 19 percent, while in Des Moines Register/Mediacom/CNN poll for Iowa, she’s nipping at Sanders’ second-place heels within the margin of error (15 percent versus 16 percent).

After a stumble out of the gate, launching her campaign with a video on her heritage that angered some Native Americans and rejecting PAC money to a collective shrug, Warren has managed to kick-start her own momentum by grinding it out—out-policy-proposing, out-tweet-thread-explaining, and out-hustling every other contender in the race. In other words, she’s running like a woman.

Beyond cheeky aphorisms, we have some pretty solid evidence that girls, on average, work harder than boys. In a New York Times opinion piece asking why girls beat boys in school but lose to them in the office, psychologist Lisa Damour asserts, with a litany of studies, that: “from elementary school through college, girls are more disciplined about their schoolwork than boys; they study harder and get better grades. Girls consistently outperform boys academically. And yet, men nonetheless hold a staggering 95 percent of the top positions in the largest public companies.”

While sons do “just enough to keep the adults off their backs,” Damour writes, “daughters relentlessly grind, determined to leave no room for error.” Her solution was not to probe at the policies, like childcare or housework, which some research points to in accounting for gender inequality in the workplace (or the possibility that girls may very well intuit that society was not set up for them to glide by in the ways in which straight white men do). But to suggest, like Sheryl Sandberg before her, that it was the girls who needed to be less like Tracy Flicks and Hermiones and more like, well, Joe Bidens, confident in their just-enough-ness.

Warren, however, seems to reject the premise of winning on the appearance of inspiring ease—of running like a just-enough man, like former C-student president, George W. Bush, or the current one, Donald J. Trump, who rode his way to the presidency on school-yard slogans (build that wall! lock her up!) and simplistic promises (repealing and replacing Obamacare will be “so easy”).

Instead, Warren not only wants to work for the job but to show us that she’s relentlessly grinding for it. In a New York Times article on the ascendent campaigns of Warren and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, he is described as riding “a wave of positive press about his personal story,” while she, rather “than lean into her biography… rolled out unusually detailed domestic policy plans to grab headlines and inspire activists...and [taken] photographs with every attendee at her events who wants one—more than 30,000 to date.” In the early going, as she started putting out policy proposal after policy proposal, it seemed like a lost cause, but slowly and surely, she has reframed the Democratic race, making her opponents look like slouches by comparison and birthing the meme and unofficial campaign slogan, “Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that.”