Are gingers natural leaders?

An article in The Press the other day gave me cause to smirk. Journalist Martin Kay thought the only way to liven up his article about New Zealand's politics was to sell it with a 'ginger' angle.

"How many Aussie gingas does it take to make history?" he wrote. The answer is two, apparently. "Russet-haired Greens leader Russel Norman" and "Aussie's most powerful redhead, Prime Minister Julia Gillard." (pictured left)

Kay's article reminded me of something I'd been pondering the other day, as I polished off a barnstorming biography of Benjamin Franklin. During the sections about the Founding Fathers, I'd been interested to learn how many of them had red hair.

In fact, red hair seems to be a distinctive trait in American leadership.

Flicking through the digital pages of Wikipedia, it soon became apparent that more than a few Presidents were ginger – George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Martin Van Buren, John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. and Andrew Jackson being the most obvious. Not a majority, by any means – but certainly statistically more than one could expect from an average cross-section of American society (even white, Anglo-Saxon society.)

Britain's most famous 20th Century Prime Ministers – Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher – were both redheads. Julia Gillard is the second ginger PM of Australia – the first was James Scullion, elected in 1929. It's a pattern repeated elsewhere, I'm sure.

In fact, everywhere you look you see a disproportionate number of redheads in position of power and authority, in relation to the rest of the population. Not a ridiculously higher number – but enough to possibly suggest a pattern.

An interesting comparison is to look at a similar trait – left-handedness.

Like with red hair, only about 10% of the population are left-handed (globally, only 1-3% of people are redheaded, but in Europe/America that percentage is higher) and preferring your left hand was considered a 'disability' right up until the middle of the 20th century.

Yet statistically, left-handed people have succeeded in far greater proportion than the right-handers. Six of the last 12 US Presidents, for example, were left-handed.

Michael Peters, a neuropsychologist at the University of Guelph, theorizes that left-handed people succeed because they're forced to live in a world adapted to right-handers, and therefore have 'extra mental resilience.' I wonder if the same thing is true of redheads.

I know that growing up ginger influenced many of my personality traits – both negatively and positively.

My rampant eccentricity, for example, is probably the result of knowing that I was never going to 'fit in' with the crowd as long as I had red hair. I never succumbed to peer pressure to smoke, do drugs or anything else 'conformist' because if I was always going to be singled out as 'the ginger,' why should I bother trying to do other things to 'fit in'?

In many ways, what I always considered a negative ultimately had a very positive effect on the person I ended up becoming.

Maybe the redheaded leaders of history and today share a similar story, or outlook on life.

Maybe their own experiences growing up 'ginger' gave them the fortitude to succeed where bland blonds or brunettes might have failed.

Perhaps adversity is the rocky cliff-face you have to scale to reach the peak of the mountain while the rest are taking the 'easy' scenic pathway.

Or maybe we're just smarter.

Either way, the statistics suggest that redheads have an increased capacity to succeed and lead – so I really better get my act together and start living up to that belief!