What helps fuel children’s ambitions to become political leaders? Their sense that they will be supported

Across the globe, many more men than women hold political office. One reason for this disparity is a seeming gender difference in political ambition: Girls start to show less interest in political activities and pursuits as early as middle school, previous studies have shown. A team of psychology researchers set out to understand why. 

In a study of 5- to 11-year-olds in the United States and China, the authors found that children’s belief that their family and friends would support their pursuit of political leadership as adults predicted their expressed motivation to become political leaders—specifically, “president” for children in the US and “chairman”* for children in China. In both countries, this relationship was particularly strong for girls compared to boys.

The study, conducted by researchers at New York University, Princeton University, Yale University, Boston University, and University of California, Riverside, appears in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

“Our study shows that the amount of support that children—and in the US, young girls specifically—think they’ll receive for pursuing positions of political leadership from their family and friends may be an important factor in children’s motivation to pursue these positions later in life,” observes Rachel Leshin, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, who co-led the study. “Communicating social support for girls’ political ambitions early on in life could be one way to fight against persistent gender disparities in political leadership.”

Method

The study was conducted from 2018 to 2021 and focused on children ages 5 to 11 in the US and China. It included over 360 children, divided nearly evenly by country and gender.​ The participants were asked questions about political leaders in their respective countries and their own career ambitions, including:

• What their concepts of political leaders were (e.g., whether they perceived leaders as possessing stereotypically feminine or masculine traits [Do leaders need to “be brave,” “care about others,” “like being in charge”?])

• How much social support they anticipated receiving for their political ambitions (e.g., whether their family and friends would help them if they wanted to become political leaders)

To determine if the children’s views on these matters bore any relationship to their own career ambitions, the participants were asked whether they were interested in becoming political leaders in their respective countries when they grew up (for “yes” responses, the children were then asked about the degree of their interest: “a little,” “some,” or “a lot”), as well as if they thought they would be good at these positions. Both of these measures were considered to be proxies for children’s political ambition or motivation. 

Results

Children’s concepts of political leaders in both countries were largely unrelated to their political ambition—even though there were both differences and similarities between the two countries’ children in what they saw as traits a president or a chairman should have: 

• Both American and Chinese children valued prestige/charisma traits most strongly (e.g., “brave,” “smart,” “polite,” “helpful”), followed by vulnerability/fallibility traits (e.g., it’s okay to “get nervous,” “be scared,” or “be shy”), and, lastly, dominance/assertiveness (e.g., it’s okay to be “mean” and “rude”).

• With age, American and Chinese children were more likely to endorse vulnerability/fallibility for presidents and chairmen.

• However, older children in China were less likely to endorse dominance/assertiveness as central to political leadership relative to younger children, whereas US children’s endorsement of this dimension was low across the entire age range.

Differences between the two nations’ children were more stark when it came to anticipated social support. In the US, older children anticipated more social support than younger ones and girls anticipated more social support than boys. Among Chinese children, Chinese boys expected to receive more social support than did Chinese girls.

“Girls in the US expecting to receive more social support than boys is a surprising result that perhaps speaks to evolving gender attitudes as well as recent shifts in discourse around women’s leadership as part of broader efforts to address gender inequities,” comments Andrei Cimpian, a professor of psychology at New York University and the senior author of the paper.  

Moreover, unlike with views of what traits political leaders possess, anticipated social support for political ambitions predicted children’s motivation to pursue such a career, with differences in this link as a function of gender (and, in the US, age). 

Perhaps most notably, this link was often stronger among girls: Among younger American children, anticipated social support was more than twice as strong a predictor of girls’ interest in becoming president than of boys’ interest. Similarly, among Chinese children, anticipated social support was significantly associated only with girls’ belief that they would be good leaders; no relationship was observed with boys’ analogous belief. 

Reut Shachnai, a doctoral student at Yale University and co-lead of the study, concludes: “These findings provide new insight into the sources of gender gaps in political ambition and, in doing so, bring us a step closer to understanding how to remedy the persistent gender imbalances in political leadership.”

The paper’s other authors were Minghui Wang, a doctoral student at the University of California, Riverside, and Yuchen Tian, a doctoral student at Boston University. 

The research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (BCS-1733897, DGE-2234660) and the National Institutes of Health (F32MH135634, F31HD107965).

*Note: Questions for Chinese children were asked in Mandarin—a language in which “chairman” is gender neutral. 

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