S5E3: Mallory Decker - The Collaboration Penalty: Why All-Women Teams Face Unique Workplace Hurdles

On this episode of the Leeds Business Insights podcast, host Claire Stewart talks with Mallory Decker, a Leeds School of Business doctoral candidate in organizational behavior and former U.S. Navy helicopter pilot who served 11 years on active duty, including tours in the U.S. House of Representatives and at NATO.Mallory explains how being one of the few women in naval aviation and often the only woman in high-level NATO meetings motivated her to study gender and teams at work. She shares research on gender pay gaps showing that not only do individual women face pay-gap challenges in male-dominated workspaces and industries, but women also face a “collaboration penalty,” driven by perceptions that women’s groups threaten the male-dominated status quo. Claire and Mallory discuss implications for organizational transparency and accountability. Mallory outlines her three-paper dissertation and offers valuable advice on why prospective PhD students should pursue programs aligned with their research interests.Leeds Business Insights Podcast is a production of Leeds School of Business and is produced by University FM.EPISODE QUOTES:What inspired Mallory to study organizational behavior?03:05: I was very often the only woman in the room where these large international decisions were being made. And it really struck me as being, "Man, I thought we had come so far as women." And I just realized there were still so many structural issues in place that I did not realize when I graduated college and was going off to enter the workforce. So, over the course of these 11 years serving in the military, I realized, "Hey, these are issues that I am always interested in reading about. These are issues that I kind of have an opinion on based off my experience, and these are things that I really think could be improved and that I would be excited to try to help change." And yes, I could see myself studying these things for the rest of my life.Advice for those who want to pursue a PhD16:44: Make sure you really want to do research, because that is what you do in the PhD program. It does require a lot of self-motivation, initiative, drive, and persistence to keep wanting to come back when you are getting negative feedback and being told your paper is not good enough for this journal, and you need to go rerun the experiment another 10 times before maybe it will work or you will find anything interesting. So it does take a lot of dusting yourself off and getting back up from it, and you have to really enjoy the process and not just the outcome if you are going to get into it. What did her research find about how all-women groups are perceived and penalized?11:17: So we found that when women work in exclusively all-women work groups, so teams of all women versus teams of all men, the gender pay gap gets worse. So when men work with all men, their pay increases. When women work with all women, that pay gap gets bigger than if they just worked alone, and their pay was taken into account just as a solo employee. And we found, we tested through some online experiments, that this was because groups of women presented a threat to an existing status quo in male-dominated workplaces that solo women workers did not present, and that male workers, either alone or in the same groups, did not present. So we found that when women work together, they present a threat of competition that they do not present when they work by themselves, and that led to lower pay.SHOW LINKS:Episode TranscriptMallory Decker | Leeds School of Business ProfileMallory Decker | University of Colorado Boulder ArticleMallory Decker | LinkedInMallory Decker | ResearchGate PageMallory Decker | Google Scholar Page