Sexism undermines teams by disrupting emotional synchrony’s role in performance

In a world where innovation and progress depend on effective teamwork, a new study reveals how sexist behavior within teams sabotages not just individuals, but the very fabric of collaboration.

Researchers found that exposure to sexist comments significantly alters how women interact emotionally during teamwork, increasing a key ingredient of successful collaboration: emotional synchrony. Emotional synchrony—shared, temporally aligned facial expressions among team members—has long been known to enhance trust, coordination, and performance. But this study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that under threat of sexism, synchrony is repurposed from driving performance to simply fostering social bonding potentially as a defense mechanism.

“Sexism doesn’t just harm individuals—it actively rewires how teams function,” said one of the study’s authors, Prof. Ilanit Gordon, from the Department of Psychology and Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University and the Child Study Center at the Yale University School of Medicine. “We saw that emotional alignment, which usually helps people work better together, loses its impact for performance when women are subjected to sexist remarks.” Gordon collaborated on the study with Bar-Ilan University PhD student Alon Burns, Prof. Sharon Toker from Tel Aviv University and Prof. Yair Berson from McMaster University.

The research involved 177 all-women dyads collaborating on a task via video conferencing. Participants were randomly assigned to a control group or a sexism condition, in which they received subtle sexist comments from an actor posing as an experimenter leading the study. Advanced facial recognition software tracked the emotional expressions of each participant throughout the task.

The results were striking: While emotional synchrony predicted improved team performance in the control condition, it had no such benefit when teams were exposed to sexism. In fact, synchrony increased in the sexism condition—signaling greater social bonding—but this did not translate into better outcomes.

“Our findings suggest that emotional synchrony under sexism threat is heightened yet redirected toward social coping, rather than collaborating,” Gordon noted. “This shift might weaken the ability or willingness of teams to stay focused on shared goals.”

The implications are clear: creating environments where women feel safe is not only a moral imperative, but also a strategic one. The researchers emphasize that zero-tolerance policies for sexual harassment are essential for maintaining the integrity and effectiveness of team-based work.

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