Interactions between males and females often display a power imbalance. Men tend to adopt more dominant physical postures, lead conversations more, and are more likely to impose their will on women than vice versa. Furthermore, social representations typically associate males with a higher power than females. However, little is known about how those representations emerge in early childhood. The present study investigated whether preschool children from different countries assign more power to males than to females in the context of mixed-gender interactions. In Experiments 1a (n = 148) and 1b (n = 403), which implemented power through body postures, 4-6 year-old children from France, Lebanon, and Norway strongly associated power with a male character. Experiment 2 (n = 160) showed that although both French boys and girls identified themselves more with a dominant than with a subordinate posture, girls were less likely to do so in a mixed-gender context. In Experiment 3 (n = 213), which no longer used body postures, boys from Lebanon and France attributed more decision power and resource control to a male puppet than did girls. By investigating gender representations through interactions, the present study shows that children associate gender and power at an early age.

Very early on, children understand the hierarchical dimension of the social environment and use a variety of cues to guess who has more power in an interaction. A crucial aspect of power perception lies in the evaluation of high-power and low-power individuals. The current study examined the evaluation of power by preschoolers through social influence. Past research has shown that preschoolers take social category information into account when expressing their preferences. In particular, they tend align their preferences with those of same-gender and same-age individuals. In the current study, 4- and 5-year-old children were presented with a power interaction between two children through body postures and were asked whether they would prefer the same items as those preferred by the high-power child or those preferred by the low-power child. Overall, the participants did not choose the items preferred by the high-power child significantly more often than those preferred by the low-power child. However, unexpected gender effects were found and indicated that the power asymmetry influenced more male than female participants. Indeed, when they saw a power interaction between two boys (Experiments 1 and 2), male participants aligned their choices with those of the high-power boy more than with those of the low-power boy. However, when male participants saw an interaction between two girls (Experiment 3), an opposite pattern was observed: they aligned their choices with those of the low-power girl more than with those of the high-power girl. In contrast, in the three experiments, there were approximately as many girls who aligned their preferences with those of the high-power child as there were girls who aligned their preferences with those of the low-power child. The current study reveals the importance of taking gender into account, both at the level of participants and stimuli, in the evaluation of power by preschoolers.