Women have been and continue to be underrepresented in science. Recent work points to pretend play, or imitating a female scientist, as an intervention to improve girls’ engagement in science and raise their persistence to that of their male peers (Shachnai et al., 2022). The present study examines how the gender of the science role model influences pretend play’s effectiveness for girls. Four to seven-year-old girls played a science game in three conditions (baseline, female scientist, male scientist). Before the science game, girls in the female and male scientist conditions were told a story about a female or male scientist. Girls in these conditions were then asked to pretend to be the scientist during the game. Girls in the baseline condition neither heard the story nor pretended to the scientist. Persistence was measured by the number of trials completed in the game. We also included a group of boys in the baseline condition to assess their persistence at the baseline level. Preliminary results (N = 112) suggested a main effect of condition: girls in the female and male scientist conditions persisted longer than girls in the baseline condition. There was no difference in persistence between female and male scientist conditions, suggesting that pretend play as both female and male scientists improves girls’ persistence in science. This finding suggests that pretend play is a robust intervention for young girls in science that is not impacted by the gender of the role model scientist.