Equal performance, unequal pay

Women’s teams can win championships and deliver results that rival those of men’s teams. Yet new research finds that they are judged differently and rewarded less because they are all-women teams.

Drawing on data from more than 900 international sporting events, workplace salary data and experiments, researchers found performance does not explain the gap. Instead, people viewed all-women teams as less legitimate and less deserving of pay than comparable all-men teams, even when outcomes were equivalent.

The findings suggest that who people work with can influence how their contributions are valued, with men benefiting from all-male teams while women working in all-women teams often do not. “Right now, organizations tend to look at pay equity one person at a time—same job, same tenure, same skill level,” said Mallory Decker, a PhD student in the Leeds School of Business and lead author of the study. “But at the group level, that gap actually gets bigger. Who you’re working with matters.”