Maria Guadalupe is going to talk about “Her Opponent: An Experiment in Perception and Gender”, created by INSEAD Professor Maria Guadalupe and Theater Director and NYU Associate Professor Joe Salvatore, out of an idea Maria had watching the 2016 US presidential debates between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. Actors of opposite gender portray the debate between Clinton (played by a man) and Trump (played by a woman), that replicated their gestures, words and body language in the October 2016 debate. The objective is to analyse whether perceptions about the candidates change when genders are switched. Maria Guadalupe is going to talk about the results and the conclusions of this experiment, which were very surprising. The expectations before the experiment were Clinton to be perceived "more presidential" as a man and Trump's attitude as "intolerable" in a woman. The authors contrasted these expectation with the opinions of viewers exposed to these genuine debates. "How we think we will perceive something is very different to how we actually feel about it"- concludes Maria. “When Trump’s words were put into the mouth of a woman, many found it sounded less brash or crazy; perhaps because it is more acceptable for a woman to be more dramatic and emotional. While there is no evidence the cross-gender casting changed anyone’s preference, it gave people enough distance to reflect on their own deeply ingrained gender bias, and to think about how they might have better understood the debates and the other perspective if they had not held such strong preference or distaste for a specific candidate”.