From team captains and line leaders to helpful and caring: gendered leadership prototypes in childhood

Abstract Gender inequality in leadership remains a grand societal challenge. Prior research suggests that implicit leadership prototypes drive this inequality through unequal emergence of women and men to leadership positions. Organizational efforts to address this gap are typically with working adults, which may be too late to yield change, as cognitive biases that shape leadership perceptions begin developing in childhood. We therefore examined gendered leadership prototypes across elementary school (K–5) in 215 children using children’s drawings of a leader and a follow-up interview. Task-oriented and relational leadership content was coded in two ways: a categorical coding and a strength-based, dimensional coding. Findings showed a same-gender bias in leader selection, with 84.0% of girls drawing female leaders and 70.2% of boys drawing male leaders ( χ 2 (1, N = 204) = 58.69, p < 0.001). Children also showed gendered leadership attributions across both coding approaches. Female leaders were more often associated with relational attributions and male leaders with task-oriented attributions in categorical coding, χ 2 (1, N = 161) = 25.45, p < 0.001, and strength coding, with female leaders receiving lower task-oriented scores, OR = 0.18, 95% CI [0.09, 0.33], p < 0.001, and higher relational scores, OR = 6.59, 95% CI [3.46, 12.93], p < 0.001. Grade-level analyses suggested that these attribution patterns were more differentiated in later grades, especially for task-oriented attribution strength (OR = 0.67, 95% CI [0.45, 0.99], p = 0.044). Together, these findings suggest that leadership attributions may already be gendered in childhood, underscoring the importance of early intervention.