Why women in groups face a ‘collaboration penalty’ that solo female stars like Taylor Swift and Coco Gauff escape

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(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

David Hekman, University of Colorado Boulder and Mallory Decker, University of Colorado Boulder

(THE CONVERSATION) When Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour became the highest-grossing concert tour of all time in 2024, hauling in more than US$2 billion, it was hailed as a breakthrough for women in music.

But Swift’s success, it turns out, didn’t translate into broader gains for female artists. A closer look at the list of top-earning tours shows a clear pattern: Among the top 27 highest-grossing tours ever, there are no all-women ensembles, while 14 are all-male.

The same discrepancy appears in album sales: No all-women groups crack the top 100 bestselling artists of all time, while 41 all-men groups do.

Does Swift’s success stem from her status as a solo artist? As scholars of management who have researched organizational behavior and workplace bias, we argue that it did. And it points to a broader conclusion: Women working in same-gender groups face a “collaboration penalty” that solo women escape. Our work found that this pattern holds across venture capital, professional sports, health care and entertainment.

Why? Our research suggests it’s because all-women groups are seen as more threatening, as they’re more likely to challenge power structures through collective action. Notably, this perception was shared by male and female study participants alike – that is, women applied this bias to all-female groups just as men did.

The venture capital disappearing act

The starkest evidence appears in startup funding.

Despite years of diversity initiatives, all-women founding teams receive just 2.4% of venture capital dollars – a figure that has barely budged in three decades.

What explains this dramatic gap? We designed an experiment in which participants evaluated venture capital pitches that were identical in substance but varied by gender and solo vs. team status. The study’s participants described all-women investor groups as much more likely to engage in “social competition” – that is, challenging existing power structures through collective action. All-men groups faced no such perception, even when making identical investment decisions prioritizing diversity.

This prejudgment mattered. Those perceived as “socially competitive” were judged as less deserving of funding and resources, our research found. The penalty wasn’t about competence or performance, because the pitches were the same. It was about how group composition triggers assumptions about motivation. All-women teams were seen as pushing an agenda; all-men teams were just doing business.

Why women on teams pay a penalty

The music industry tells the same story.

Solo women can reach the pinnacle. Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Madonna and Pink all rank among the world’s top musical earners. But their success makes the absence of all-women groups even more glaring. If individual women can succeed at the highest levels, why can’t groups of women working together?

Our research on professional sports provides an insight. We analyzed prize money from 1,145 major international competitions across 44 sports from 2014-2021. Solo men and solo women earned similar amounts. But in team sports, a massive gap emerged: All-women teams earned less than half of their male counterparts.

This wasn’t about performance. The all-women teams in our dataset had won their competitions – they were literally champions. The gap also wasn’t about popularity or revenue generation, as we controlled for sport type and governing body. Something about the group composition itself triggered lower compensation.

To test this mechanism, we conducted another experiment. Study participants viewed identical athlete profiles, varying only by gender and whether the athlete competed solo or in a same-gender group. Once again, all-women groups were perceived as more socially competitive than all-men groups, and this perception predicted lower expected compensation – even when performance statistics were identical.

As a consequence, women team athletes pay an expensive penalty. For example, no women at all appear in Forbes’ top 50 highest-paid athletes in 2025. Notably, the highest-paid female athlete, tennis player Coco Gauff, plays an individual sport – but even her $33 million of earnings in 2025 would rank around 150th if compared with men. And only one of the top 15 highest-paid female athletes plays a team sport: basketball star Caitlin Clark, who earned just $119,000 in WNBA salary her rookie year, compared to $16 million in individual endorsements. Even Clark’s success comes from being valued as an individual brand, not for her team play.

It’s not just elite athletes

These patterns don’t apply just to high-profile industries. We found the same effect in a conventional workplace: a large health maintenance organization in the northwestern United States.

We analyzed salary data for 682 medical providers across 18 clinic locations. Among solo practitioners, men and women earned similar salaries. But providers working in same-gender groups showed dramatic pay gaps. Men in all-men groups earned the most ($111,004 on average), while women in all-women groups earned the least ($52,497) – less than half. This held even after controlling for age, experience, credentials, specialty, patient satisfaction scores and clinic location.

These weren’t cherry-picked cases but licensed medical professionals with quantifiable performance metrics, working for an organization with formal human resources policies and pay scales. Yet the gender composition of their immediate work group somehow predicted a $58,000 annual salary difference – despite women’s higher average patient satisfaction scores.

Perhaps the most striking illustration comes from professional sports cheerleading. NFL cheerleaders earn approximately $150-$500 for performing at the Super Bowl, while the minimum NFL player salary is $885,000.

Even players on the losing Super Bowl team who never leave the bench earn $103,000 each – roughly 687 times what cheerleaders make for performing the entire game. Both groups face high injury risk. Both perform at the same event. The difference? One is an all-men team, the other an all-women team.

What can be done?

To counter this deeply entrenched bias, organizations could look at their compensation data not just to detect individual gender gaps but to see whether all-women teams systematically receive smaller bonuses and raises than all-men teams. Likewise, investors and funders could examine whether a team’s gender composition influences the evaluation of proposals, separate from actual team qualifications and business potential. Manager training could also explicitly call out this misconception as inaccurate, unconscious and costly.

Most importantly, it should be understood that employees rarely control their team’s gender composition. Women are being economically penalized for something shaped by organizational demographics, project needs and scheduling – factors entirely outside their control.

Women can succeed alone. Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Coco Gauff prove that. But until all-women groups receive the same legitimacy, funding and compensation as all-men groups, enormous talent and economic potential will be left on the table. As our research shows, the collaboration penalty isn’t just unfair – it’s economically irrational.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/why-women-in-groups-face-a-collaboration-penalty-that-solo-female-stars-like-taylor-swift-and-coco-gauff-escape-280317.