Gendering the presidency without gender in the presidency

In recent years, a series of polls have found that majorities of voters at least claim to be willing to vote for a female presidential candidate. For example, a poll of registered voters conducted by the Siena College Research Institute found that 81 percent of voters would vote for a woman for president. And prior to Hillary Clinton's primary campaign of 2008, polls found that about 60 percent of voters said they expected a woman to be the Democrats' nominee for president in 2008. These numbers show a significant increase in recent decades in the public's perception of females' ability to campaign for and serve in the upper echelons of American power. For example, polls taken in the late 1960s showed that only half of voters would support a well-qualified female presidential candidate.