Is sexism really the reason the election is so close?

Over the weekend, President Obama said a number of things about the 2016 election. Among them was a declaration that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump do not have comparable resumes or temperaments and nothing he’s seen thus far suggests that Trump is actually ready for the White House.

In fact, Obama said, the election should not even be close but will be because of sexism, epitomized by the country’s continued discomfort with women in leadership roles and different facets of Clinton’s personality.

So, The Fix reached out to Mandy O’Neill to help us pick Obama’s claim apart.

O’Neill is an associate professor of management in the George Mason University School of Business and senior scientist at George Mason’s Center for the Advancement of Well-Being. She has a doctorate in organizational behavior from Stanford University, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. She’s spent decades researching organizational culture, emotions in the workplace and career development. O’Neill’s research has been published in the Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, and the Harvard Business Review.