It’s been 298 years and counting since a woman led Pa. Will that matter in the election?

Fifty years before the Revolutionary War, Hannah Callowhill Penn led the colony of Pennsylvania, first while her husband, William Penn, suffered a series of incapacitating strokes, and then alongside a group of trustees after he died. Though “but a woman” — as she once described herself — for 14 years she settled boundary disputes, appointed and replaced government officials, and navigated relations with the Crown. She died in 1726.

Since then, for 298 years and counting, Pennsylvania has never again had a female leader; voters have never elected a woman as governor or as U.S. senator. The question in this heated election season is whether Pennsylvania’s lacking record offers clues — or warning signs — about the state’s current willingness to elect the nation’s first female president.

“Pennsylvania is a solidly D-range state,” said Courtney Lamendola, the director of research at RepresentWomen, which publishes an annual gender parity index. Before 2019, Pennsylvania regularly ranked 49th in gender parity nationwide, repeatedly receiving an F.

To be fair, lots of other states also rate poorly. Along with Pennsylvania, three other swing states — Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin — have never elected a woman to be governor. (Neither has California, where Vice President Kamala Harris served as attorney general and senator before becoming vice president). Women have served as governor in 32 states, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.

In recent years, Pennsylvania has done some catching up: Today, five out of 17 state seats in the U.S. House are held by women, as are roughly 32% of seats in the General Assembly, where Joanna McClinton was elected last year as the state’s first female speaker of the House and Kim Ward is the first female Senate president pro tempore. Debra Todd is currently serving as the first female leader of the state Supreme Court. Cherelle L. Parker is the first female mayor in Philadelphia’s 342-year history.

Of five statewide elected executive positions, two are currently held by women: Stacy Garrity is state treasurer and Michelle Henry is state attorney general.

Yet the top job — the highly visible, crisis-responding role of governor — has remained out of reach.

“For observers, if you’re looking at a possible Kamala Harris presidency, having women run and win statewide executive office would be a positive,” said Dana Brown, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Center for Women & Politics at Chatham University. “But I don’t think that it’s necessary as a factor in order for her to win.”

Voters always cast their ballots with a spectrum of concerns and motivations in mind, and of course specific candidates matter more than generic identities. Yet observers don’t have much real data about how Pennsylvanians vote when it comes to Harris at the top of a ticket, because she didn’t compete in a traditional primary. The last time a woman led the presidential ticket in Pennsylvania, former President Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by roughly 44,000 votes.

Alison Dagnes, a political science professor at Shippensburg University, called this the most gendered presidential election of her lifetime, even as Harris has avoided emphasizing the historic nature of her candidacy. Both candidates are attempting to appeal to their bases through different definitions of masculinity, with Trump attempting to portray the election as a choice between “the strong” vs. “the weak,” Dagnes said.

“Even when Biden was the nominee — this was being painted as the strong vs. weak. President Donald Trump’s idea about strength and masculinity is paramount to his candidacy,” Dagnes said. “So then you swap out Harris for Biden and it becomes the boy vs. girl campaign.”

Women who have run and won in Pennsylvania say it’s a tough place for anyone to campaign, because of the many different kinds of voters a candidate must appeal to. U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean (D., Pa.), who originally ran for her seat in 2018 when there were no Pennsylvania women in Congress, said she was always conscious during her campaign about the ways “women are judged differently from men,” from their appearance to the way they speak.

“We have to sound serious but not shrill,” Dean said, noting that Europe’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, lowered her pitch, with the help of a voice coach, in order to project authority.

Money also presents a barrier. Past research has suggested that male candidates have access to bigger donor networks, Brown said, and statewide competitive races are enormously expensive.

Dean seriously considered running for the open U.S. Senate seat in 2022, she said, but ultimately decided not to, in part because of the daunting infrastructure and money that would be required to win statewide. She was also concerned about “splitting the vote” with Val Arkoosh, another Democratic politician from Montgomery County who was running.

“I always worry about that,” Dean said. “You don’t want to undercut a viable woman candidate.”

Some of the traditional barriers to electing women to top jobs in Pennsylvania won’t affect Harris. She is already the nominee, and she is both taking in and spending far more on her campaign than Trump is on his.

“I don’t think there’s a reason to suggest that [Harris] would have less of a chance in Pennsylvania overall because of her identities than a Joe Biden,” said Kelly Ditmar of the Center for American Women and Politics.

Still, recent polls illustrate gender may play into the race in other ways. In Pennsylvania, there’s a stark gender gap among voters, with far more women in Pennsylvania favoring Harris, and far more men favoring Trump, according to last month’s Philadelphia Inquirer/New York Times/Siena College poll. Nearly 40% of adults nationwide also believe that the fact that Harris is a woman will hurt her candidacy, a higher percentage than those who believed the same about Hillary Clinton, according to an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from September.

Allyson Schwartz, who represented Philadelphia in the state Senate and Congress for more than two decades, and lost to Tom Wolf in the 2014 Democratic primary for governor, was often the only woman in the delegation. (“What a lonely place that had to have been,” Dean said of the experience; Schwartz is a mentor of hers).

Schwartz saw how being a “first” fueled excitement among voters, she said. But that alone is not enough to win a competitive race.

“You don’t just go after one group of voters. You go after many groups of voters,” Schwartz said. “You do it in a way that you hope finds common ground.”

When reporter Dana Bash specifically asked Kamala Harris to weigh in on what it might mean to be the first woman president, Harris effectively declined.

“I am running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender,” Harris said.

Rep. Dean said when she considers why Pennsylvania has not yet elected a woman to be governor, she thinks of Hannah Callowhill Penn, leading the state long before the United States was a country. She expects to see a female governor and a female senator (or two) from Pennsylvania in her lifetime.

“We have a history. Women have led,” Dean said. “We just gotta get back to that.”