It’s Kamala. Hillary. Nancy.

But not Joe, Donald or Barack.

What’s up with the first-name treatment we give women in power?

“We’re constantly being reminded that there are only a few women in politics and so it’s this exceptionalism that we’re reinforcing over and over again,” said Mirya Holman, an associate professor at the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston who often gets a casual “Mirya” rather than “Professor Holman” in her workdays.

True, it’s more likely to happen when you have a distinct name like Mirya or Kamala.

There are tons of reasons to explain this away in politics.

“It’s tricky with these particular candidates,” said Kelly Dittmar, an associate professor at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton was working to distance and distinguish herself from husband Bill Clinton. For Vice President Kamala Harris, “it gives her something to lean into in terms of her distinct identity,” Dittmar said.

And let’s be honest, women in leadership are constantly fighting another twist in cultural stereotyping by finding the balance between showing authority and being called nasty or bossy.

Then there’s the added challenge of retail politics to finding that elusive, person-I’d-want-to-have-a-beer (wine)-with quality on the campaign trail. It’s simply easier for voters to imagine that with someone they know on a first-name basis.

Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) signs everything “Nancy.” “It’s a chicken-and-egg thing, did they start calling her ‘Nancy’ and she just owned it?” Dittmar said.

And there are male exceptions — Ike and Bernie. The slogans worked in their favor, as everyone liked Ike and Sanders supporters felt the “Bern.”

In Harris’s case, it’s definitely a generational thing. My Gen Z son who’s in college was clear about that: “Her name is unique, like a lot of us,” the college student whose circle includes Red, Linus, Imogen and Pirate said. “I don’t know any Donalds or Georges. Plus, it shows she’s not just another White person. ‘Harris’ can just be any old White guy.”

Truth.

“Her generation represents a real turning point that we’re becoming a multicultural nation,” Holman said. In fact, Harris was born before the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case that made banning interracial marriage unconstitutional.

So it can make sense why this happens on the campaign trail.

But hold on, that doesn’t erase the theory that short-handing women to their first names doesn’t have something to do with our culture’s intractable gender bias.

Oh no, that stuff is all around us.

If anecdotal evidence (female professors often tell me that students ditch the titles and casually use their first names almost immediately) isn’t enough, there’s a whole field of studies that show this, especially in science and tech.

“Across eight studies combining archival and experimental methods, we report evidence for a gender bias in how people speak about professionals,” a report published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said.

“When discussing professionals or their work, it is common to refer to them by surname alone (e.g., “Darwin developed the theory of evolution”),” the study said. “We present evidence that people are more likely to refer to male than female professionals in this way. This gender bias emerges in archival data across domains; students reviewing professors online and pundits discussing politicians on the radio are more likely to use surname when speaking about a man (vs. a woman).”

It’s pronounced in the medical field, where studies show female physicians are “more than twice as likely as their male counterparts to be addressed by their first name in messages from patients,” according to a Mayo Clinic Open Research Letter published by the JAMA.

It’s been excused away as a sign of affection and familiarity.

Nope.

Let’s revisit the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection of our nation’s Capitol building, if we need evidence of that.

The rioters in the video footage of the attack (always good watching, to remind us of the facts) stormed into the building shouting two names, specifically:

“Hang Mike Pence!”

And “Nancy! Nancy! Nancyyyyyy!”