Unfortunately, the numbers don’t necessarily affect elections in the way one might expect, said Faye Ginsburg, Ph.D. and Rayna Rapp, Ph.D., professors of anthropology at New York University and founders of the Council for the Study of Disability. The two took turns reading from prepared remarks, while a transcript of the lecture flashed across a screen, and an interpreter provided a translations in American Sign Language.

The researchers made their remarks at the Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disabilities, delivered on April 27 at the Rose Hill campus. The lecture, “Disability Publics: Toward a History of Possible Futures,” examined how the presence of disabilities is dramatically increasing and transforming national consciousness. It was initially thought that growing numbers might wake a “sleeping giant,” during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“Given the stark contrast between the Clinton and Trump campaigns around disability issues, we nonetheless assumed . . . that the disability vote would indeed rally for Clinton, whose policy recommendations addressed areas of key importance to this constituency,” they said.

The speakers said they had been optimistic because of the increased visibility of the community through social media, including a campaign called “#cripthevote” which rallied the disability vote.

Candidate Trump’s mocking of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, seemed to shore up the disabilities vote for Clinton, they said. And the Clinton campaign capitalized on the gaffe by running an ad in which a teen age cancer survivor with a limp watches footage from the rally and tells viewers: “I don’t want a president who makes fun of me, I want a president who inspires me.”

A month later disability activist Anastasia Somoza was a featured speaker at the Democratic National Convention. Ginsburg and Rapp said the infrastructure of the convention was notable for its attention to accessibility.

“For a brief moment, it seemed as if political arithmetic might work to alter the electoral process,” they said.

However, the two said they were stunned when Trump won the electoral vote. “We had to revisit our overly optimistic assumptions about a unified disability constituency and scrutinize what actually happened.”

It turned out that the disability vote was split along party lines, as it had always been—despite Trump’s egregious behavior, they said.

The speakers said they’re profoundly concerned about enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act, particularly after Secretary of Education Betsy deVos’s confirmation hearing revealed a lack of knowledge of the legal entitlements to special education.

While Attorney General Jeff Sessions is more knowledgeable, they said, he has shown “contempt” for the legal guarantees for free and appropriate public education of American children with disabilities. They said it’s time to make the political platforms on disability rights more transparent, so that the entire voting block understands what’s at stake.

“Clearly, we cannot take longstanding federal legislation for granted; the ADA is under threat as is the very recognition of the personhood of those with disabilities,” they said. “As scholars and activists, we need to understand what happened, as we collectively imagine how we might move forward.”

While psychologists have used the test extensively, it’s never been used by political scientists to gauge how those characteristics might affect the way people vote—until now.

A new book by Monika McDermott, Ph.D., an associate professor of political science, explores the subject in Masculinity, Femininity, and American Political Behavior (Oxford University Press, 2016). Based on part on a study of more than 800 participants, the book delves into how political behavior can be influenced by gendered personality traits. It also demonstrates that biological sex does not necessarily dictate gendered personalities or partisan preferences as traditionally believed.

McDermott had heard the idea that certain gendered traits are associated with particular political parties, with the Democratic Party believed to hold a compassionate, feminine nature to the Republican Party’s tougher, more masculine nature.

“I started thinking of this in 2012 when I taught a class, Women in Politics, and we covered the idea of masculine and feminine voting—as opposed to biological sex,” said McDermott. “Most political science research involves biological sex. This is separate from that.”

Given that the course she was teaching focused on women, McDermott said the class roster skewed toward women. But when she administered the Bem test in class, she found that some of the women possessed more masculine traits, such as aggressiveness and competitiveness, than the feminine traits, such as compassion and gentleness.

“These were college-attending, career driven women in New York City,” said McDermott. “You have to have elements of competitiveness and strength to even come here.”

McDermott acknowledged that there is some criticism of the Bem inventory’s categorizations, but the categories still help define perceived differences between the two dimensions, she said.

With the results of the Women in Politics class in hand, McDermott began to distribute the Bem questionnaire to all of her political science classes—a more biologically diverse group. There she found that masculine characteristics often aligned with Republicans and feminine characteristics aligned with Democrats.

It was then that McDermott began to contemplate a nationwide study. She designed a questionnaire that merged the Bem questions with questions on political attitudes and activities. That questionnaire forms the basis for her book.

“This is completely intuitive stuff, but we applied a quantitative method,” she said, adding that her students helped inspire the research. “It’s amazing that no one has applied it to political activity. Pundits talk about this, but there’s no one who has checked it out.”

McDermott said that her next study would be on how candidates’ gendered personalities may have an effect on voters—a topic she says is ripe for the upcoming election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

“You have people who have very obvious masculine traits, which is what we look for in a political leader, but there’s a cognitive dissonance for voters if the candidate is a woman,” she said.