The old saying goes that death and taxes are the only certainties in life, but sexism in a presidential election seems like it can be added to the list.

Over the past few days alone, we’ve seen a few new instances of what happens when we don’t interrogate the misogyny at play in this race. The Cut published results from a survey it conducted with YouGov on people’s feelings on the female presidential candidates. Despite reporting that one respondent referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren as “shrill and irritating” and another saying that Senator Amy Klobuchar was too “politician-y,” it seems we’re still talking around the fact that sexism is a real issue. A recent piece for Politico asked why the writers and editors at the leftist publication Jacobin have seemingly turned on Warren without positing that sexism could be a factor, even though misogyny on the left has been a topic of conversation for many years.

The underlying message seems to be the same: We’re all much too aware and informed to possibly, maybe be letting our biases against women creep into this election. But diminishing the role of sexism in this race and in politics isn’t just bad for our overall progress; in the short term, it could also be a reason we end up with four more years of Donald Trump.

First, the notion that Democratic male candidates would just breeze right through Trump’s white supremacist–pandering macho act while the women would struggle is naive and inaccurate. As FiveThirtyEight’s Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux pointed out in August, Americans tend to look for presidential candidates who have qualities typically seen as masculine (already a sexist problem), and Trump exists on the far end of the tough-guy-crushing-beer-cans-on-his-head spectrum. This doesn’t even take into account that he’s got a staunch support base while the Democratic Party can’t seem to agree on a consistent ideology, let alone a singular person. Any Democratic male candidate will have to figure out a way to navigate a race where they most likely won’t be seen as the ultra-manly alpha male to voters. The idea that it’s just women who face this issue is missing the larger problem.

But second, the notion that we’ll just wait for Trump to leave office in order to elect a female president or make any progress for women is short-sighted. It’s not like sexism or misogyny didn’t exist until Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015; he’s a symptom of our culture, which will obviously continue on its course long after he leaves office. He didn’t have to be an original thinker. He pulled from common misogynistic tropes and insults to build support among Americans who agreed with him but hadn’t found a politician who fully and publicly articulated those opinions. On the more liberal side of things, researchers for YouGov wrote for the Washington Post this summer about their finding that more than one quarter of Democratic primary voters have “higher than average” hostile sexism scores. And plenty of researchers have found that just because people say they’d vote for a woman president doesn’t mean they wouldn’t hold a potential female candidate to impossible standards.

If we don’t address the rampant misogyny in our nation now, new reasons not to elect women — or help women achieve other political advancements, for that matter — will continue to emerge, even if Trump were to disappear in a puff of smoke tomorrow. No one can predict the future, but history has shown that when nations feel like they’re in turmoil, progress for marginalized groups is often one of the first pieces of societal fabric to fall by the wayside. We live in an increasingly unstable world. There will always be alarm bells sounding. That hasn’t stopped other nations, like Finland, for example, from moving forward on this front.