As former vice president Joe Biden’s presidential campaign rose, reanimated, on Super Tuesday, the campaign of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., seemed to collapse, like a souffle. It was prepared flawlessly, with excellent structure and loft, but the thing about souffles is they all collapse eventually. No one expects otherwise.

So, it seems, with the campaigns of women running for president. Their defeat is more than the caprice of primary voters, who zig and zag en masse. Their defeat is also a failure of imagination. Voters do not know what a president who is also a woman looks or sounds like. They have never seen or heard one before. They have not even seen a female vice president. And in uncertain times (and all times are uncertain), there is comfort in knowing you are voting for a candidate who could, perhaps, under the right circumstances, become president, while not casting your ballot for a chair, a three-toed sloth – or a woman.

In this 2020 cycle, six women ran for president of the United States. That they had seen another woman do it must have mattered greatly to them, too. After a midterm election that sent a record number of women to Congress, hopes for them were high. But convincing voters during a presidential election may be a problem of a different order of magnitude, as Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump suggests.

For a possible model for what female representation can do for perceptions among citizens, we can look at India, a country with deeply rooted gender inequality. In 1993, India instituted a quota system in local village councils, decreeing that a proportion of all seats be held by women and lower-caste individuals. Similarly, a proportion of a district’s villages had to have a woman as chief. The villages with female village chiefs rotated at random every five years.

More than a decade after the quota system began, researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private, nonprofit organization based in Massachusetts, began a comprehensive 11-village study. In one experiment, they played taped excerpts from a speech by a hypothetical male or female leader. In villages that had never experienced a female leader, men rated the speeches of women significantly below those of the male leaders as a measure of “effective” leadership. But men from villages with female leaders rated the speeches remarkably higher, on par with the effectiveness of men. Even while there was still a “taste” for male leadership, these men had heard female chiefs with their own ears, and it changed their perceptions of effective leadership. In addition, after two cycles of quotas, men who had been broadly critical of the performance of female leaders during the first cycle they were in office rated them on par with male leaders the second time around, suggesting, the authors said, that “exposure matters.”

Of course, who is to say how directly these results would translate to American politics. The office of the president will never be subject to quotas, but the Indian example provides compelling evidence that attitudes are likely to change once we see – and hear – a woman in the Oval Office.

The simple fact of a woman leading from the White House might be enough to drastically answer reservations about whether a woman can win a general election or build a coalition, but until she gets there, the questions will dog her, as they did Warren.

Warren, asked about the role gender may have played in the campaign after she dropped out, had this to say: “Gender in this race, you know, that is the trap question for every woman. If you say, ‘Yeah, there was sexism in this race,’ everyone says, ‘Whiner!’ And if you say, ‘No, there was no sexism,’ about a bazillion women think, ‘What planet do you live on?’ ”

Many women are heartsick at the collapse of her campaign, seeing in it metastasized sexism at work. Who, they wonder, was more prepared than Warren, the Hermione Granger of the Democratic Party, she of a thousand plans, a Harvard appointment, an unbeaten election record?

At the end of the day, there is no real mystery. There is only the dull drumbeat of time and the wavering arrow of progress and the sense of waiting for something long overdue.

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