“I support a woman for president, but not that woman.” Is that really it?

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There have been a lot of questions raised in the tumultuous days following the 2024 presidential election. But the most puzzling one is why in 2024 our country still has not elected a woman as president.

After all, women around the world have been elected president or prime minister of their country, starting in 1960 with Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon. Other countries soon followed, including India, Israel, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Pakistan, Lithuania, Nicaragua, Bangladesh, Turkey, New Zealand, Finland, Germany, Liberia, Greece, Denmark and Brazil, along with a host of others. Altogether, about 80 of 193 recognized free countries have elected a woman for their top government position.

But not the United States. Our first woman candidate who was a major-party nominee, Hillary Clinton, ran in 2016 and won the popular vote but not the Electoral College. And earlier this month, our second female major-party candidate, Kamala Harris, lost after a whirlwind 107-day campaign to Donald Trump.

Americans critiqued both women’s campaigns. They weren’t tough enough. They were too tough. They focused on the wrong issues. They represented a left-wing ideology. They were too hard or too soft on the issues or ignored key issues. They had indiscretions in their past, whether Clinton’s emails or Harris’ relationship with an older boss 30 years ago.

But the bottom line is a quirk of American voters recently noted by Olga Khazan in The Atlantic: “American voters tend to believe in the abstract that they support the idea of a woman candidate, but when they get the real woman in front of them, they find some other reason not to like the candidate.”

In fact, communications professor Karrin Vasby Anderson at Colorado State University in 2017 wrote a whole paper on this trait entitled “Every Woman is the Wrong Woman.”

Comments after this election, in which 53% of white women voted for Donald Trump, reflected this behavior. Even after factoring in Harris’ biracial status, which also made some voters shy away, the comment that kept popping up was: “I support a woman for president, but not that woman.”

Meanwhile, a great many people said they didn’t like Trump’s rudeness, his crude comments about women and his complete lack of civility toward the world at large, but they said they were going to vote for him anyway.

This supporting of a woman in the abstract role but not in real life can be seen in a Pew Research poll from the summer of 2023 in which, for the most part, Americans said the gender of the candidate didn’t matter. But at the same time, 46% of respondents said they thought other Americans were not ready to elect a woman to a top office.

Indeed, Americans do a complicated dance on the issue of gender and electability. In an October poll by YouGov involving 1,139 adult citizens, 77% said they believed in gender equality in the abstract. But 40% think women are judged more harshly than men in a campaign, 39% said the media spent more time discussing a woman’s physical appearance than a man’s and 40% said male candidates treat their female opponents more harshly than their male counterparts.

Then there’s the likability factor. Women, more so than men, are expected to be likable while at the same time being more likable is seen to make them too weak for political office, as in not being tough enough to be tough with challenging people and situations. But even if a man is considered to be unlikable, he’s still considered the superior candidate if he can be tough.

As one voter said, he didn’t think a woman could face Russian President Vladimir Putin.

When confronted with this double standard in qualifications for president, many voters do a quick reversal of the most qualified candidate being the one to select and collide with what some analysts call “the imagination barrier.” They have never seen a woman as commander in chief so they don’t think it’s possible and won’t vote for a woman.

Unfortunately, many Americans, whether they admit it or not, have beliefs about the nature of women that don’t line up with their views of what it means to be a leader. Therefore they will not vote for a woman and at this rate are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of never seeing what a woman commander in chief looks like.

Are we just more sexist than those 80 countries that have elected a woman as president or prime minister? Is the American stereotype of a leader being an Old West patriarch so ingrained we cannot ever see a woman as a leader? Would the results have been different if either of these women had run against a different Republican candidate? There’s a lot of us wanting to know.

Lois Thielen is a central Minnesota journalist, now retired as a longtime editorial columnist for the St. Cloud Times, and the author of six local history books. She and her husband farm near Grey Eagle, Minn.