Assistant professor Katelyn Stauffer recently received two awards from the Southern Political Science Association for her paper “What Misperceptions Can Teach Us About Symbolic Representation.” The first is the Marian Irish Award which recognizes the best paper on women and politics presented during the previous year’s SPSA annual meeting; the second is the Pi Sigma Alpha Award which recognizes the best overall paper presented at the SPSA meeting. In this paper, Stauffer draw on research related to women and politics, political representation, and misinformation to examine American beliefs about women’s inclusion in office, and the consequences these beliefs have for citizen evaluations of government responsiveness. This paper is part of a larger book project which examines the consequences that misperceptions have for democratic legitimacy