A new study conducted by Dartmouth researchers reveals that a woman's ability to win an election may be based on how feminine her face appears to voters.

"A female politician's success was related to how feminine or masculine her face was perceived less than one half-second after its initial exposure,” said Dr. Jon Freeman, the study's senior author and an assistant professor and director of the Social Cognitive & Neural Sciences Lab at Dartmouth, the Medical Daily reported. Seemingly, competence takes a back seat to appearance for women in public office.

To investigate, Freeman and his colleagues enlisted the help of nearly 300 participants. Seated before a computer, participants were shown photographs of politicians' faces — the winners and losers in U.S. Senate and gubernatorial elections between 1998 and 2010 — and then the participants were asked to categorize them as male or female.

What did the researchers discover? The more participants’ mouse movements strayed toward selecting the male response when they categorized the gender of a female politician's face, the less likely she was to win her election (as verified by actual election results).