As the 2022 midterm election season gets underway, speculation is already mounting that it’s going to be another banner year for female candidates. Early reports suggest that Black women and Republican women are especially poised to make historic gains.

But make no mistake, even if 2022 is another so-called “Year of the Woman,” politics is still a man’s game.

At first glance, that claim seems to fly in the face of reality. Women in politics aren’t just running for Congress in 2022. They’re everywhere all across the political spectrum. The vice president and the Speaker of the House are women. Republican Liz Cheney is the face of the congressional committee investigating January 6.  Conservative firebrands Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are social media stars. AOC is a household acronym. And Ballotpedia has already identified 13 Democratic and seven Republican women as prospective presidential candidates for 2024.

But we’ve been studying women and men’s interest in running for office for decades. And overall, women today are just as unlikely as women were 20 years ago to express interest in running for office.

We started tracking people’s interest in running for office in 2001, when we launched the first wave of the Citizen Political Ambition Study—a survey of 4,000 “potential candidates.” These are people with professional backgrounds common among elected officials—lawyers, business people, educators, and political activists. Among this sample of equally matched women and men, women were dramatically less likely than men to have thought about running for office. Whereas 59% of men had considered running for some elective position, the same could be said of just 43% of women. Women were also much less likely than men to express interest in running for office in the future. This was true regardless of political party affiliation, income, age, race, region of the country, even martial and parental status.

Ten years later, we conducted another survey of 4,000 potential candidates. By this time, Nancy Pelosi had been elected the first female Speaker of the House; Hillary Clinton had run for president; Sarah Palin had been a vice presidential candidate; and the percentage of women in Congress had increased by 25%. Yet, the results of 2011 Citizen Political Ambition Study were indistinguishable from the 2001 findings. The gender gap in interest in running for office was just as large—16 percentage points—and just as sweeping as it had been a decade earlier.

Read the full article about the ambition gap by Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox at Brookings.