Democrats generally seem happy with their large field of potential presidential candidates, but some grumblings have been heard alleging that the women in the race are being held to a higher standard. While female Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris discuss their long and impressive resumes, younger males like South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Congressman Beto O'Rourke emphasize the personal qualities that will enable them to do great things.

New research suggests this dynamic is hardly limited to presidential politics. A new study finds that, for managerial positions, male job candidates are largely judged by their potential, while females tend to be evaluated based on their past performance.

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, featured two similarly structured experiments, both conducted online via Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

The researchers discovered a consistent pattern. "When participants ranked male candidates, there was a preference for potential," they write, "whereas leadership potential was overlooked when they ranked female candidates."

"Male candidates that demonstrated higher potential were perceived to have a more impressive resume, and were expected to perform better in the future than male candidates who demonstrated higher performance," the researchers report. The opposite was true for female candidates.

The result of this unconscious bias is that, even when female candidates' past performance matches that of their male competitors, "women would be held to higher standards in the selection process, because their leadership potential would be less likely to be recognized than men's."

Read the full article about unconscious bias judging male and female candidates by Tom Jacobs at Pacific Standard.