No, women didn’t abandon Clinton, nor did she fail to win their support.

In April 2015, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation (BLFF) and the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) launched Presidential Gender Watch 2016, a project to track, analyze, and illuminate gender dynamics in the 2016 presidential election. With the help of expert scholars and practitioners, Presidential Gender Watch worked for 21 months to further public understanding of how gender influences candidate strategy, voter engagement and expectations, media coverage, and electoral outcomes in campaigns for the nation’s highest executive office. The blog below was written for Presidential Gender Watch 2016, as part of our collective effort to raise questions, suggest answers, and complicate popular discussions about gender’s role in the presidential race.

In an attempt to explain Tuesday’s presidential election results, some media outlets and commentators have looked to pin the electoral outcome on a specific demographic set of voters; black voters didn’t turn out, more Latinos supported Trump than expected, or women abandoned Clinton. These narratives are not only short-sighted, but largely incorrect. For example, experts from Latino Decisions have reported on the inaccuracy of exit polling of Latino voters. Others note the very real voter suppression efforts that have had a disproportionate effect on black voter turnout, and comedian Samantha Bee begged viewers to turn their attention to white voters, the voters who ultimately elected Donald Trump.

Some of Bee’s sharpest criticism was directed at white women, who she claimed chose a “vial of weaponized testerone” over the first female president. Bee’s commentary is not unfounded; the majority (53%) of white women cast their ballots for Donald Trump on Tuesday. But the idea that white women “abandoned” Clinton, or the feigned surprise at their voting behavior, is misleading.

The majority of white women have voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election since 2004, and they have done so in greater proportions than they did this year.  In 2012, 56% of white women voted for Mitt Romney. John McCain earned 55% of white women’s votes in 2008, and George W. Bush won the support of 55% of white women in 2004. Clinton actually fared slightly better among white women than Barack Obama did in 2012, earning 43% of their votes compared to the 42% for Barack Obama four years ago. In fact, Clinton outperformed Obama significantly among college-educated white women, earning 51% of their votes and besting Trump among this group by six points; in 2012, Mitt Romney held a six-point advantage against Obama among this group. In 2008, when Obama fared better among college-educated white women, he still earned just 52% of their votes. Moreover, Clinton won married women by 2 points, the first Democratic candidate to do so in 20 years.

What explains these data? Party identification. In 2016, Pew found that the plurality of white women identified as Republicans. Among white women without a college degree, Republican Party identification has grown over the past 24 years. With this knowledge, it’s far less surprising that Trump outperformed Clinton among this demographic. Party identification is the key indicator of vote choice, and there is no evidence that gender affinity would buck that trend. Research from scholars and the Barbara Lee Family Foundation backs this up, with decades worth of findings that party trumps gender in voter decision-making.

That false presumption of gender affinity – that women would be more likely to vote for a woman candidate – seems to be at the root of the apparent shock that white women didn’t support Clinton. Of course, Democratic women were just as unlikely to support a Republican ticket with a woman on it in 2008 as Republican women were to vote counter to their party identification for a female-led ticket in 2016. Few people expected Democratic men to vote for Trump this year simply because they share the same chromosomes, so perhaps we shouldn’t apply that logic to women either.

A more reasonable prediction of women’s shift to Clinton came from those who assumed that Trump’s misogynistic comments and behavior would deter women across parties to support his candidacy. There was evidence of that potential defection in polls showing high unfavorability ratings for Trump among Republican women throughout the election cycle. But disliking Trump may not have translated into voting for Clinton, and we shouldn’t have expected it to; if anything, it may have simply caused some GOP women to stay home or write in a candidate that shares their ideology.

We can debate whether or not white women’s support for Republican politicians or policies is in their best interest or not, which seems to be the real critique underlying post-election narratives, but claiming that Clinton somehow failed to win white women is an unfair characterization of the facts.

Finally, claiming that women abandoned Clinton not only misrepresents historical facts and misunderstands what motivates women’s (and men’s) voting behavior, but also excludes the majority of women – who did vote for Clinton – from the picture. Clinton won 54% of women’s votes on Tuesday night, a performance on par with Democratic presidential candidates in the past two decades. More specifically, the majority of women cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton in 23 of the 28 states where exit polls are available. In fact, if only women voted, Trump’s success in at least 10 battleground states (AZ, FL, GA, IA, MI, NC, OH, PA, TX, WI) would have been reversed.

The narrative of abandonment is particularly exclusive of women of color. Clinton won 94% of black women’s votes, similar to the 96% of black women who voted for Obama. In Latino Decisions’ election eve poll, 86% of Latinas reported supporting Clinton (18 points higher than the national exit poll). In the same poll in 2012, 77% Latinas expressed support for President Obama. These women voters have been key to Democratic candidates’ success, and that remained true this week.

In the autopsy of the election 2016, there is good reason to pay close attention to women voters, but that means doing the work to avoid homogenizing them or evaluating their behavior without historical context. Only then will we tell a complete, and complex, story about women voters’ influence in the race to put a woman in the White House.