Many women are left feeling defeated after Elizabeth Warren’s exit from the presidential race.

With a crushing loss on Super Tuesday, and voter after voter quoted in the media saying they’d vote for a woman, just not Warren, it made some wonder if a woman would be president in their lifetimes. Warren spoke about the bind women candidates face while talking with reporters Thursday afternoon.

“Gender in this race — you know, that is the trap question for every woman,” Warren said, standing outside her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after announcing she would be suspending her campaign Thursday. “If you say, ‘Yeah, there was sexism in this race,’ everyone says, ‘Whiner.’ And if you say, ‘There was no sexism,’ about a bazillion women think, ‘What planet do you live on?’”

For the second time in four years, an exceptionally qualified female candidate lost to her male counterparts — some objectively far less qualified. Warren’s loss was not as sudden or shocking as Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. But what stung for many was the depth of voters’ rejection, so much so that Warren came in third in her home state of Massachusetts on Super Tuesday.

“I can’t stress to you how tired I am of answering the same questions,” Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz told Vox in an interview Thursday, after publishing an essay on Warren’s loss. “We’ve just asked for one chance for a woman to lead the country. Just once, let’s try a woman.”

Sexism was a big factor in Warren’s loss — though it was far from the only one. The specter of President Donald Trump and Democrats’ obsession with finding the most “electable” candidate to beat him loomed over everything in the primary. It also relied on long-held assumptions about what a “successful” candidate looks like.

“I am so disappointed with voters in this country, I wonder if a woman could win,” New Hampshire voter Chris Hurley, a self-described progressive woman, told Vox in January. “I hate to say that. It may be a white middle-aged man. We’ve got to beat Trump.”

Warren certainly made missteps during the campaign. But America apparently isn’t ready for a woman president — at least not yet.

“One of the hardest parts of this is all the pinky promises and all those little girls who are going to have to wait for four more years,” Warren said Thursday, her voice cracking slightly.

What we know about the role that sexism played in the 2020 primary

There’s no doubt sexism played a major role in the way women running for president were treated throughout the primary.

Candidates, including Warren, were questioned for their likability, their ambition, and their ability to win in ways men simply were not, echoing long-held double standards that still exist for women candidates. Biases about both gender and race likely intersected on myriad other fronts as well.

For instance, a July poll of likely New Hampshire voters found good favorability numbers for both Warren and then-candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (67 percent for Warren, 54 percent for Harris) but dismal “likability” ratings for them. Just 4 percent of likely voters thought Warren was “likable,” and 5 percent for Harris. Compared to that, 20 percent of likely voters thought Biden and Sanders were likable.

While 38-year-old former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg was rarely questioned about his ambition running for the highest office in the land after governing a city of fewer than 102,000 people, Massachusetts residents registered their displeasure with Warren for her presidential bid before it even started.

An October 2018 Suffolk University poll of Massachusetts voters found just 17 percent thought Warren should run for president, compared to 68 percent who said no (about 10 weeks before she announced her candidacy). Warren’s favorability ratings in the state were decent, but not many wanted her to try for the presidency. That could be viewed as Massachusetts voters not wanting to lose Warren, but it could also be seen as disliking a woman’s ambition.

“It’s another version of, ‘Know your place. We’ve already given you this thing; how dare you aspire to more,’” Schultz said. “I don’t see that message telegraphed to men. There should be no guilt about being ambitious.”

Women running for president also needed to prove their qualifications more than the men they were up against.

“It’s one thing for voters to support a woman as part of a deliberative body, like a legislature, as ‘a’ decision-maker. But in order for her to be ‘the’ decision-maker, voters have to be that much more convinced she’s qualified,” says Amanda Hunter, a communications and policy director at the Barbara Lee Foundation.

Women candidates were more than aware of this expectation, tailoring their speeches and rollouts to highlight their experience, policy bona fides, and track record of winning.

“Every office I’ve run for — no one like me had ever done the job,” Harris said in an interview with NBC News. “Based on gender, based on race. Every time, pundits said the people weren’t ready for it. But I won.” Warren, too, got so many questions about this subject that her campaign signage was tailored to emphasize how she could win.

Clinton’s shocking 2016 defeat elicited voters’ fears that a woman couldn’t beat Trump again in 2020, even though women candidates had won in droves during the 2018 midterms.

“When it comes to the difference between the midterms and today, I think voters are terrified of anything that looks or feels similar to 2016,” said Democratic strategist Meredith Kelly, the former communications director for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s presidential campaign, as well as for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2018. “And because of that almost blinding fear, I think female candidates were at a particular disadvantage in the race to take on Trump.”

“Male candidates have the benefit of being judged by their potential for greatness, and women have to bring receipts,” Kelly added.

Prejudices about women could well have translated to voters’ decision-making: A study from YouGov’s Sam Luks and Tufts University’s Brian Schaffner, released in July 2019, found Democratic primary voters who scored higher on a “hostile sexism” scale were less likely to choose either Warren or Harris as their top choice for the primary when polled.

Luks and Schaffner established this scale by asking voters a battery of questions about their attitudes on gender, a panel developed by social psychologists Peter Glick and Susan Fiske. Voters were asked to agree or disagree with statements like “most women fail to appreciate fully all that men do for them” and “women seek to gain power by getting control over men.”

Luks and Schaffner concluded that dealing with such sexism was an obstacle that women candidates in the Democratic primary continued to face with a subset of voters, though they added that voters pushing back against sexism could flock to the Democratic Party during the general election and boost a woman candidate.

In an updated survey released this week, Schaffner and Data for Progress co-founder Jon Green polled voters before the Iowa caucuses and found the same trend: Voters who had more sexist attitudes were less likely to support Warren.

Questions related to candidates’ gender were abundant during the primary, particularly on the issue of electability: Throughout the race, women candidates had to answer questions over and over again about electability — even though none of the most prominent women had ever lost an election before.

“When people say it shouldn’t be a woman this time because a woman lost last time, well, men have been losing the presidency for hundreds of years,” Hunter told Vox.

There were other factors, too

It is ultimately difficult to pinpoint just how big a factor sexism was during the 2020 primary — and whether it was the factor that hurt women candidates’ chances.

“Gender, broadly speaking, is always interacting with and influencing factors that are important to a candidate’s success or defeat,” says Kelly Dittmar, a political science professor at Rutgers University and scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics.

For the five women who have so far dropped out of the 2020 race, there are 20 men who also exited. The Democratic field was massive from the get-go, and male candidates of color like Sen. Cory Booker and Julián Castro struggled to find their footing before ending their campaigns as well.

Just like the men running in 2020, the women all had individual strengths and weaknesses that respectively bolstered and impeded their bids.

Warren, for example, established herself as an effective and detailed policy wonk who has a plan for everything, but she peaked early in the polls and was bogged down at times by the rollout of her health care proposal and her use of a DNA test to try to prove Native American ancestry.

She wasn’t the only one. Harris was known for being a charismatic leader who struggled with a consistent message and had to reckon with a sometimes-contradictory record on criminal justice reform. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who came in a surprisingly close third in the New Hampshire primary, was dogged by early allegations of staff mistreatment. Despite hammering a message of being electable in Midwestern states that Clinton lost, and rattling off a long list of legislative accomplishments in the Senate, Klobuchar also bowed out. Gillibrand (D-NY), a candidate focused on women’s issues, could not shake blowback from the Democratic base and donors alike for her role in the ouster of former Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) for his alleged sexual harassment.

Male candidates have faced electability questions, too. There were plenty of concerns about Biden’s spate of gaffes and the Trump administration’s intense interest in his son’s ties to a Ukrainian energy company (so much interest, it led to Trump’s impeachment). There are lingering concerns about Bernie Sanders’s October heart attack or whether his ideological agenda is too risky for the general election. But these things were ultimately easier for primary voters to accept than almost all the women candidates when the Republican opponent is Donald Trump.

“The electability argument was so frustrating, and is so frustrating,” Schultz said. “This narrative had the force of a storm in terms of, you’re battening down the hatches instead of throwing the windows open wide to see what the possibilities are.”

Things are changing

One of the most disheartening takeaways from the recent developments in the 2020 race is the feeling that progress around gender equity in politics has remained stagnant.

Columnist Jessica Valenti said as much in a Medium post:

Last night, my nine-year-old daughter came over to me because I looked upset. When I told her I was sad because I felt like I would never see a woman be president, she told me, “Well, you’ll see at least one — me.” I want her to be able to hold on to that optimism because the truth is that I’m fresh out of hope to give her.

While it is undeniably — and devastatingly — true that the United States has still yet to elect a woman president, there is progress taking place in the US Congress that is building up an even larger bench of women lawmakers to keep pursuing higher office.

In 2018, Democrats’ efforts to retake the House were driven heavily by women candidates. Of the 41 seats that Democrats flipped from red to blue during the midterms, 23 were won by women, many of them in purple districts in states like Iowa and Michigan. Both Senate pickups the party had — in Arizona and Nevada — were also won by women. On top of that, four out of seven gubernatorial flips were won by women, including in Michigan, Kansas, and Maine.

“I think that people are forgetting the lessons of 2018,” Rep. Katherine Clark, vice chair of the House Democratic caucus and a surrogate for Warren, told Vox in a January interview. “When people are scared, which they are, they kind of look for what they’ve always known as the safe choice.”

It’s worth noting, too, that after Clinton’s run in 2016, there were a groundbreaking number of women vying for the Democratic nomination this cycle, who helped further normalize the idea of running for president.

It’s also true that for whoever emerges as the nominee, there will be incredible pressure to pick a woman for the vice presidential spot. As Errin Haines writes for The 19th, female activists have ramped up their focus on the No. 2 slot and called on Biden and Sanders to prioritize choosing a woman for the role.

As more women run for office at different levels across the country — a number that spiked dramatically in 2018 — more will be in position to run for executive office down the line. And candidates’ willingness to call out sexism, though it can be seen as hurting the chances of women candidates in the future, also enables people to confront the problem head-on.

“The more that women push these institutions, the more that we see sexism playing a less pervasive role,” says Dittmar.