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Women’s teams can win championships, draw huge audiences and rival men on the field. But according to new research, women’s teams are often judged differently and rewarded less than comparable all-male teams despite producing the same results.

The research suggests the gap isn’t just about popularity or revenue. In a series of studies spanning sports, healthcare and workplace settings, researchers found that all-women teams are often evaluated differently and paid less even when their performance matches men’s.

Mallory Decker

“The gender pay gap is compounded by who women work with. When women work exclusively with other women, they’re judged differently than men who work with men,” said��Mallory Decker, a PhD student at the��Leeds School of Business and lead author of the study, published in February 2026 in .

“What’s different here is that it’s happening at the group level,” said��David Hekman, associate professor of organizational leadership and information analytics at Leeds and co-author of the study. “But once you get into teams—sports, music, venture capital—that’s where the gap really shows up.”

The research began with a simple question: Why have pay gaps narrowed for some individual athletes and entertainers but stayed so wide for teams?

“There’s been a lot of attention on the gap between men’s and women’s pay in sports, especially team sports,” Decker said. “You see individual women doing incredibly well—Serena Williams, Naomi Osaka—but that gap hasn’t closed in team settings.”

Using data from more than 900 international sporting events��across 44 sports—from soccer and tennis to surfing—spanning 2014 to 2021, along with salary data from healthcare organizations and a series of experiments,��Decker and Hekman found a consistent pattern: Men tend to benefit financially from working together, while women working in all‑women groups often do not. In those events, men competing in groups earned more than twice as much as women in comparable group competitions. Meanwhile, pay for individual events was far closer, with much smaller gaps between what men and women earned.

David Hekman

Performance doesn’t explain the gap in team pay. In the study, men and women teams produced identical results, but people consistently rated all‑women teams as more likely to challenge the status quo and as deserving less pay, while all‑men teams were seen as more legitimate.

“When men work with other men, it supports norms people are used to,” Decker said. “They seem more dominant, more competent—and that’s what we tend to value.”

“That’s not true for women,” she added. “When women work together, it can feel outside the norm, and people are more likely to react to it as something disruptive.”

Those reactions are often subconscious, Hekman said.

“A group of women can be perceived as��threatening because it looks like they could change existing social hierarchies,” he said. “And in our study, those perceptions were linked to lower pay.”

That same pattern shows up beyond sports, the study found. All‑women groups are largely absent from the highest‑grossing music tours, reflecting a broader trend the researchers also observed in workplaces like healthcare.

“It’s not that women can’t succeed,” Hekman said. “They absolutely do as solo performers. It’s that when women work in groups, they’re basically not even on the scale.”

Decker said that bias isn’t usually intentional.

“I don’t think people are consciously thinking, ‘Let’s pay women less for equal work,’” she said. “But everything in our experiments was the same except for gender—and people still rated women as deserving less pay.”

That study’s findings have implications for workplaces trying to close pay gaps, Decker added.

“Right now, organizations tend to look at pay equity one person at a time—same job, same tenure, same skill level,” she said. “But at the group level, that gap actually gets bigger. Who you’re working with matters.”

For Hekman, the takeaway raises a broader question. “If we like teams—and we clearly do,” he said, “why do we only seem to value them when they’re men?”