With the long-awaited announcement that Hillary Clinton is running for President now here, she is about to be back in the spotlight, and her campaign should hope that the attention is on their terms. If history has taught us anything about women in politics, Hillary should expect to face the onslaught of attention most presidential candidates face, but also additional attention and criticism on account of her gender. Political campaigns are a nasty business, and for politically ambitious women, this nastiness is amplified. It is unlikely that Hillary’s 2016 experience will be any different.

Unfortunately for those of us who long for prognostications and future forecasts, we have very little information on which to base our predictions of Clinton’s forthcoming experience with campaign coverage by media. Nonetheless, history does provide us with some lessons.

The XX Factor

Considerable scholarship from the fields of political science and communications has used systematic examination of media coverage of women running for political office to find support for a media bias against women. Women who run for Congress and governor tend to receive less overall coverage, less issue coverage, more negative coverage, and more coverage focused on their dress and appearance than their male counterparts. While more recent studies suggest the media bias in favor of men is on the decline, it does not look as though this is the case for women running for the presidency. We have very few modern day examples of women making competitive runs for president (Dole in 2000 and Clinton in 2008), and thus our data is limited. Yet, for Dole and Clinton, media appears to have been more of a hindrance than any help for their presidential runs. While Clinton saw a similar amount of coverage to that of the rest of the Democratic primary field in 2008, in 2000, Elizabeth Dole did not. Moreover, for both Dole and Clinton, their coverage was more negative, and more focused on their dress and appearance than their male competitors. Yet with only two contemporary competitive runs at the White House by women, our sample size is very small. With the exception of Elizabeth Dole, our only data point is Clinton, leading many to speculate that the negative attention and media coverage for this office is not on account of Hillary’s sex, but instead on account of her being Hillary Clinton.

The Hillary Factor

The 2008 election was not kind to Clinton. Throughout the Democratic primary race, Clinton was characterized unfairly by the media, suggesting Obama was getting a free ride. This criticism continued from Republicans in the general election, where Obama received arguably less scrutiny that John McCain. In 2008, Clinton received more coverage than Obama, but hers was of a more negative variety—focusing on her appearance, leading to perceptions that she was a less viable candidate.

For Clinton, much of her experience with the media has been as a lightning rod for criticism since she first emerged on the public scene in 1991 during Bill Clinton’s first presidential run. In particular, Hillary Clinton has endured scrutiny for her lack of femininity.

Hillary Clinton endured unprecedented scrutiny for a candidate’s wife from her husband’s political opponents and the news media alike. This was arguably deserved, due to the Clinton’s “buy one get one free” slogan, in that a Bill Clinton presidency included Hillary as an advisor. The Clintons campaigned on not only what Bill would bring to the White House, but also what Hillary could contribute. The assumption made by the Clintons that voters were prepared to accept a prominent role for a first lady might have been precocious. As elaborated on by communications scholars Karrin Vasby Anderson and Kristina Horn Sheeler in their edited volume Governing Codes: Gender Metaphor and Political Ideology:

While the Clintons were banking on the assumption that most baby-boom generation voters viewed politics and gender relations as they did, Republicans recognized Clinton’s “buy one, get one free” statement as a golden opportunity to paint Rodham Clinton as a radical feminist and play on cultural fear about powerful women.

When her career-woman persona was attacked on the campaign trail with her husband, Clinton defensively remarked, “I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession which I entered before by husband was in public life.” This was in response to questions about her law firm’s role in state business in Arkansas, where her husband was Governor. By defending her career-woman persona, Clinton solidified circling criticisms that she was less traditional than former first ladies. Once the Clintons assumed the White House, Hillary was appointed head of the Task Force on Health-Care Reform, much to the chagrin of her detractors.

Since moving into the political spotlight in her own right, Clinton’s femininity has remained a topic of conversation. From her surplus of pantsuits, to her “hair clip fail,” Hillary Clinton has not been able to appease the public’s desire for an appropriate amount of femininity in a political female figure. Deemed the double bind, by political scientist Kathleen Hall Jaimison, women who run for political office occupy the impossible position of appearing capable enough to be a strong leader, and feminine enough to ward off any discomfort many Americans feel when they see powerful women.

Despite prevalent criticism of her lack of femininity, Clinton did not set out to reverse opinions on this front during the 2008 primaries. Instead, her early campaign was dominated by a theme of toughness, and as remarked by a labor leader introducing Clinton at a rally, “testicular fortitude.”

The decision to run a campaign embracing Clinton’s toughness was a deliberate choice made by her campaign advisors. As detailed by journalist Ann Kornblut in her book, Notes From the Cracked Ceiling, in November of 2006, Clinton met with her top advisors in Chappaqua, NY. Mark Penn, a pollster, noted that all available data suggested that the only way a woman could win the presidency in 2008 would be to position her as tough enough to lead the country at a time of war. In an internal memo, he wrote, “most voters see the president as the ‘father’ of the country. They do not want someone who would be the first mama, especially in this kind of world.” Penn went on to write, however, that the right kind of woman who was tough—in other words, masculine—could be this “father.”

Unfortunately, many Americans presume the only effective kind of leadership is macho, and the only means of maintaining our country’s global preeminence are masculine. The leads many women who run for political office, including Clinton in 2008, to run away from their sex and emphasize more masculine traits and policy concerns. Moreover, once elected, women (especially Democrats) engage in “compensatory strategies” to overcome the perception that they lack credibility in dealing with issues such as national security or defense. Given the social and implicit psychological association between masculinity and national security issues, women, who are implicitly associated with femininity, often position themselves politically to be recognized as capable of dealing with more masculine policy concerns. This would at least partially explain why Clinton quickly sought a seat on the Armed Services committee, once elected to the Senate in 2006. Many commentators suggested the move was a strategic one for Clinton, who was assumed to have presidential ambitions and therefore sought to shore up expertise and credibility on issues of defense. The assumed and positive association between masculinity and national security, and national security’s association with the office of the presidency, is a disadvantage for females with presidential ambitions, further exacerbated by the increasing focus of our executive branch on foreign policy and international conflict.

While Clinton and her campaign attempted to portray her as the patriarch our country needed in 2008, history may remember a different strategy by her campaign. Her display of emotion during the her New Hampshire primary victory, Clinton’s voice cracked and tears welled up in her eyes as she reflected on the road to victory in the state. Day-after reports by news outlets across the globe questioned the authenticity of her tears, or whether the tears signaled that she was overwhelmed by stress. In an analysis of Clinton’s coverage, Erika Falk found over 500 news stories that covered Clinton’s emotional moment, compared to less than 40 articles that covered a story that same weekend of political protesters chanting “Iron my shirt!” at one of her campaign rallies. Furthermore, her opponents jumped on the opportunity to exploit the emotional display as a means of drawing into question her ability to lead. Then-challenger John Edwards remarked, “I think what we need in a commander-in-chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are tough business, but being president of the United States is also tough business.” This incident paint an accurate picture of Clinton’s overall experience while running for president: While she tried to run her election as a qualified, experienced candidate that deemphasized her female sex, she was lambasted the moment she let her guard down, and her femininity through.

Clinton’s forthcoming strategy is likely to be different from 2008, but it is unlikely that Clinton will emphasize her more feminine, or softer side, due to popular notions that feminine traits and characteristics are void of any real political leadership potential. This is unfortunate, since feminine leadership—including collaboration, deliberation, and compassion—is rife with possibilities for positive influence in our political institutions. Few should expect a campaign whose candidate emphasizes these traits, especially while also being a woman, any time soon. Thus, while the election of Clinton would be historic, and surely a victory for those women before me who fought for gender equality in our political institutions, her road to this victory will likely be paved with the same old masculine posturing, and tough guy performances, even for a woman.

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Meredith Conroy is an assistant professor at California State University, San Bernardino. She serves as the chair of the Western Political Science Information Technology Committee, and is a member of the Status of Women in the Profession Committee. Her book, Masculinity, Media, and the American Presidency, publishes in October 2015.