You’ve probably seen it on social media before: a paragraph of scrambled text that looks like nonsense at first glance, yet somehow you can read it with surprising ease.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

This effect, often playfully referred to as typoglycemia, is frequently shared online as a quirky insight into how our brains work.

But this viral claim is only part of the story. To understand why it works, we need to look at how the brain actually processes written language.

There is no magical ‘rule’

The claim that usually accompanies this snippet is that as long as the first and last letters of a word are in the right place, the order of the middle letters doesn’t matter.

At first glance, the claim seems plausible.

But while there is a kernel of truth here, the explanation is misleading.

Reading scrambled words has much less to do with a magical “rule” about first and last letters, and much more to do with how our brains use context, pattern recognition and prediction.

We don’t read letter by letter

When we read, we typically don’t painstakingly process each letter in sequence. Instead, skilled readers recognise words rapidly by drawing on multiple cues at once. Psycholinguistic research shows that we process words as patterns rather than as sequences of individual sounds.

These include familiar letter patterns, the overall shape of the word and, crucially, the context of the sentence. Our brains are constantly predicting what is likely to come next, then checking those predictions against the visual input.

This is why we often miss typos in our own writing. We don’t see what’s actually on the page, we see what we expect to be there.

The same principle helps us make sense of jumbled words. Even when letters are out of order, enough of the structure remains for the brain to make an educated guess.

Word shape and structure matter

The viral meme suggests that only the first and last letters matter.

But this oversimplifies what’s really going on. We are sensitive to how letters relate to each other within a word. Common spelling patterns and familiar combinations make words easier to recognise, even when slightly distorted.

This is also why certain visual disruptions make reading harder. Text in alternating caps, such as “AlTeRnAtInG CaPs”, is difficult to process because it disrupts the usual visual contour of words. The same goes for “ransom note” lettering made from mismatched fonts, which interferes with pattern recognition.

In other words, readability depends on preserving enough of a word’s internal structure, not just its outer letters.

Not all scrambled text is readable

If the meme were true, any sentence with intact first and last letters should be easy to read. But that’s not what we find.

Take this example:

Salhal I cmorape tehe to a srmmeus day

It follows the supposed “rules”, yet it is much harder to decipher. In fact, this is the opening of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

So why is the viral paragraph so much easier to read? Because it has been carefully (if unconsciously) engineered to be readable.

The hidden tricks behind the meme

Several factors make the famous example easier to process than it appears.

First, many of the words are short, which limits how many possible combinations the letters could form. Words like “you” and “can” are often left unchanged.

Second, function words such as “the”, “and” and “is” are usually intact. These small, common words provide the grammatical scaffolding of the sentence, making it easier to predict what comes next.

Third, when longer words are scrambled, the changes are often minimal. Adjacent letters are swapped (“wrod” for “word”), which is much easier to process than more extreme rearrangements.

Finally, the passage itself is highly predictable. Once you recognise the topic and rhythm, your brain fills in the gaps automatically, much as it does when listening to speech in a noisy environment.

The key to understanding this phenomenon is context. Words are not processed in isolation. Each word is interpreted in relation to the others around it, and within a broader framework of meaning.

This allows us to compensate for missing or distorted information.

But there are limits. As scrambling becomes more extreme, or as words become less predictable, comprehension quickly breaks down. Reading speed also slows noticeably, even when we can still make sense of the text.

Humans and machines

Interestingly, computers can now unscramble jumbled words with remarkable accuracy. By analysing probabilities and patterns across large datasets, algorithms can determine the most likely original form of a word or sentence.

In this sense, machines and humans rely on similar principles. Not rigid rules about letter position, but flexible systems that weigh patterns and probabilities. This highlights why the “typoglycemia” claim is an oversimplification, rather than a scientific rule.

The idea persists because it captures a genuine insight in a catchy way. It reveals that reading is not a simple, letter-by-letter process, but a dynamic interaction between perception and expectation.

At the same time, it’s a reminder of how easily scientific ideas can be distorted as they spread online.

So yes, we can often read scrambled words. But not because the order of letters doesn’t matter. It’s because our brains are remarkably good at making sense of imperfect information. So good, in fact, that they can turn a mess into meaning.

Karen Stollznow does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

When a couple marry in a church, synagogue or mosque, the ceremony does more than sanctify a union. Often, it binds two families to an institution.

For centuries, marriage and child-rearing have been among the main ways adults are integrated into congregational life. Couples who share the same faith tend to be more observant, and they often raise children within that tradition – bringing the next generation into congregational life. More marriages mean more families in pews and more children raised in the faith.

That helps explain why the rise of single adults is so unsettling for many faith communities today. In the United States, 42% of adults were not married or living with a partner in 2023, up from 38% in 2000. This shift is unlikely to change soon: A quarter of 40-year-olds have never been married, and a third of Gen Z are projected to never marry.

At the same time, the share of unmarried Americans who belong to a religious congregation has fallen well below that of married Americans. According to the Pew Research Center’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study, 68% of married adults identify as Christian, compared with about 51% of never-married adults. Twenty-four percent of married Americans are religiously unaffiliated, compared with 39% of Americans who never married.

As a behavioral economist and a business school professor, I study what I call the “solo economy”: how the rise of single adults is reshaping workplaces, taxes and consumer markets. Religious institutions are the latest domain to face the same shift. They are not simply confronting lower marriage rates. Many of them, I contend, are reckoning with the consequences of treating unmarried adults as incomplete members of the community.

Alarm across faiths

According to the Survey Center on American Life, the gap in religious membership between married and unmarried Americans has widened substantially since the 1990s.

At the time, 71% of married Americans said they belonged to a religious congregation, compared with 64% of unmarried Americans. In 2019, those numbers were 59% and 45%, respectively. Barna Group, an evangelical Christian polling firm, found that just 1 in 4 single mothers attend church weekly – the lowest rate of any parent group.

Communities that have historically built their infrastructure around married families are feeling the shift most acutely: couples retreats, small groups organized by life stage, children’s programs, and leadership roles that quietly assume a spouse. The cumulative effect is less about overt exclusion than about whom the institution imagines when it pictures itself.

In an April 2021 address during a churchwide conference, M. Russell Ballard, then one of the top leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, acknowledged that more than half of adult church members were widowed, divorced or not yet married – and that some “wonder about their opportunities and place in God’s plan and in the Church.” In July 2024, the church expanded its “young single adult” category from ages 18–30 to 18–35.

In evangelical Christianity, sociologist Katie Gaddini’s research for her book “The Struggle to Stay” found that women – especially those over age 35 – often felt overlooked, excluded from leadership and valued less because they had not married.

At a women’s conference in London, one attendee captured the tension: “I’m so tired of fighting Christian church leaders to be treated equally, but I don’t want to leave the church. So, what do I do?”

In Modern Orthodox Judaism, similar patterns of exclusion have emerged. A 2022 Nishma Research survey found that singles reported the lowest sense of community connection of any group studied: 69 on a 100-point scale, compared with 81 for married members. Another 2022 report, by Brandeis University sociologist Sylvia Barack Fishman, described unmarried members feeling “ignored and invisible” in synagogue life, sometimes treated as if they were broken people waiting to be fixed.

On my podcast, sociologist Ari Engelberg, author of “Singlehood and Religion,” described how unmarried adults in Israel’s Religious Zionist community internalize their single status as a religious failing. The community treats marriage as so central to observant life that remaining single can feel like falling short.

Doubling down

Religious institutions’ responses to the rise of singles have split in two directions.

Some have reasserted marriage as the expected path to adulthood, belonging and spiritual maturity. Pope Francis, for example, repeatedly warned about declining birth rates, calling the trend a “tragedy” in a 2021 address. In a 2023 worldwide broadcast, Dallin H. Oaks, who is now the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, urged single adults to date more, marry earlier and not delay having children. And in June 2025, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution lamenting “willful childlessness” and calling for laws that “incentivize family formation.”

In qualitative research with single churchgoers, a consistent theme emerges: Marriage comes up regularly in sermons – in illustrations, examples and applications – while singleness almost never does.

That instinct is understandable. But a strategy built for a society where most adults married young is a poor fit for one where many never will.

But doubling down carries a real cost. When single adults hear, again and again, that the fullest version of faithful life is married life, many do not feel called upward. They feel pushed outward.

Adapting

Other religious communities are adapting.

In the U.K., the Single Friendly Church Network developed a guided audit to help congregations across denominations assess how welcoming they are to people who come alone. In the U.S., ministries such as Table for One have tried to move singles programming away from matchmaking and toward spiritual community. And Fishman’s 2022 report on Modern Orthodox Judaism urged synagogues to give singles leadership roles, committee seats and ritual honors, regardless of marital status — though whether those recommendations have taken hold remains an open question.

But adaptation raises its own question. Are these efforts designed to support single adults as full members of the community or to manage them toward marriage? There is a difference between welcoming singles and treating singlehood as a problem to solve.

I see several practical steps for religious institutions that want to keep unmarried adults engaged in their communities:

1. Count who is actually in the pews. Leaders may not realize how many of their members are single, divorced or widowed. The Single Friendly Church Network found that when congregations conducted demographic audits, many were surprised by the results.

2. Give singles real authority. Inclusion does not mean creating a special ministry and leaving decision-making to married people. It means leadership, voice and visibility.

3. Rethink the language of belonging. Sermons and announcements that reflexively address “families” and “couples” can make unmarried adults feel peripheral. Small linguistic changes can signal that they are not.

4. Build community rather than dating pools. The goal should not be to funnel unmarried adults toward coupledom. It should be to treat them as complete people whose spiritual lives matter now.

Religious institutions have joined employers, policymakers and consumer brands in facing the same choice: Adapt to a society with more single adults, or keep building for a world that no longer exists.

Peter McGraw does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Many consumers – and state policymakers and even utility companies – are worried about the possibility of large numbers of data centers raising electricity demand and power prices.

Those are real concerns, but our engineering research finds that if designed, constructed and operated carefully, data centers can actually help the communities that host them.

On-site energy storage

Locating power-generating capacity on-site, even using modified jet engines to drive steam turbines, is one emerging option to address data centers’ high power needs.

But there are other options, too. Data centers can install backup batteries that would kick in during an outage or could be used to avoid an outage when demand spikes. The batteries could not only provide power to the data center but also to the surrounding area in times of need.

Various types of battery designs and chemistries offer options for storing enough energy to keep a data center running from a few hours to a few days. This would be critical in supplying electricity during outages because of extreme weather events or excess demand on the grid during periods of peak usage.

Longer duration batteries are also in development. Plans for a new Google data center in Minnesota include solar panels and wind turbines with batteries that would become the world’s largest electricity storage system, with a power capacity of 300 megawatts. Google plans to install iron-air batteries, which are based on chemical reactions with iron to separate and store charge, that would store enough electrical energy to keep a data center running for as much as 100 hours.

Another long-duration battery design uses zinc and water as its key chemical ingredients. It needs relatively little cooling, so batteries can be stacked closely. Significant storage capacity could allow data center owners to flexibly decide when to use energy directly from the grid, when to run off the batteries, when to recharge the batteries, and even whether to sell power back to the grid to earn extra money.

Using waste heat in the community

Data centers produce large amounts of heat, which must be removed from the computer chips. A data center gives off enough heat to potentially keep nearby buildings warm.

Many cities around the world already have what are called “district heating systems,” in which a group of buildings are connected with a pipe network and receive their heat from a central heat source.

Data centers could serve as a heat source for these systems. Recent improvements in these systems, called a “thermal microgrid” or an “ambient loop,” don’t require steam or extremely hot water, but rather use cooler temperatures of water to transport heat between the buildings. Efficient electric heat pumps in each building use that water loop to adjust the building’s air temperature in both winter and summer, creating combined district heating and cooling systems.

In this scenario, data center heat becomes not wasted energy rejected into the air but a money- and energy-saving resource for the local community. For example, a 75 megawatt data center in the town of Mantsala, Finland, is supplying heat to approximately 2,500 homes in the community.

Combining energy production, storage and heating

In our research, we suggest that combining data centers equipped with on-site power generation and battery energy storage and systems that use the waste heat could make the data center a benefit to the community rather than a drain on its resources.

Locating a data center with on-site battery energy storage in a neighborhood and, crucially, connecting them both thermally and electrically could create a small-scale energy community. In addition to providing heat, the data center could help meet the neighborhood’s electricity needs during power outages, storms or peak usage periods.

Improved efficiency of computing

As a fourth dimension to achieving sustainability in data centers, an emerging approach involves drastically reducing the energy consumed for every unit of computation. That would mean exponential growth in computational tasks does not require a corresponding exponential growth in hardware or electricity usage.

Advances in computer chip designs are making data center processors significantly more efficient, able to do larger numbers of more complex calculations more quickly while using less electricity.

But however efficient the chips get, there is both need and opportunity to make them dramatically more so. A growing field called “unconventional computing” is poised to help.

This field, which includes computing approaches inspired by the architecture of the human brain in the emerging technology of neuromorphic AI, as well as engineering innovations such as chips that use their own waste heat, can exhibit thousands-, millions-, or even billionsfold increases in power efficiency. That could make data centers immensely more capable of the computing tasks needed for training AI systems.

Improvements in data center efficiency would reduce the demand for more computing chips and more electricity to run them, even while producing more output.

Researchers across academia, industry and government agencies are developing road maps to scaling these new pathways for energy-efficient computing and are planning for a future where new materials with fundamentally different properties improve efficiency even more.

Some of these advances may be months away, though others could be decades into the future. But we believe that taken together, the opportunities for power generation and storage, waste heat reuse and improved computational efficiency could make data centers beneficial for their communities, and society as a whole, in support of energy affordability and resilience.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

In Latin America, as in other parts of the world, the second Trump administration has adopted an increasingly aggressive policy.

From drone strikes on purported drug traffickers to increased tariffs on imports, and from the blockade on fuel shipments and threats of invasion in Cuba to the Jan. 3 military incursion into Venezuela, the U.S.’s more coercive approach to its hemispheric neighbors evokes an earlier period of U.S. foreign policy.

Many commentators have found echoes of the 1989 capture of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega in the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Others highlighted the longer history of U.S. interventions in Latin America stretching back through the Cold War. That includes the Nixon administration’s support for the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile or the CIA-sponsored removal of Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954.

Yet as a historian of early 20th-century Latin America, I believe the Trump administration’s approach to Latin America more closely resembles an older pattern of U.S. policy. Between 1900 and the mid-1930s, U.S. forces intervened in one Latin American country after another. This practice was often justified by the Roosevelt Corollary, President Theodore Roosevelt’s addition to the Monroe Doctrine. In cases of “chronic wrongdoing,” Roosevelt said in 1904, the U.S would find itself compelled to exercise an “international police power” in defense of U.S. interests.

But crucially, how Latin Americans responded to the U.S. exerting its dominance in the early 20th century may hold some lessons for the present day. One of the major side effects of the U.S.’s so-called gunboat diplomacy was an upsurge of resistance and anti-imperialist thinking in the region’s political life.

The roots of anti-imperialism

In the 30 years after Roosevelt asserted the U.S.’s right to intervene across the hemisphere, U.S. forces occupied Cuba three times – in 1906-09, 1912 and 1917-21. They also occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. In Nicaragua, the U.S. deployed the Marines from 1912 to 1925 and then again from 1926 to 1933, waging a counterinsurgency in which it used aerial bombardment for the first time.

Across much of the region, then, this was a time when the U.S. was quick to resort to force, unburdened by any concerns for Latin American countries’ sovereignty.

Yet this era of external intervention also coincided with a period of remarkable political ferment, which I describe in my recently published book, “Radical Sovereignty.”

In one place after another, from Buenos Aires to Mexico City and from Havana to Lima, movements sprang up that put forward sharp critiques of U.S power. Many of them grew out of student organizations in the late 1910s, while others drew on the rising strength of labor unions and newly formed leftist political parties.

In 1923, rural workers in the Mexican state of Veracruz formed a Peasant League. From the outset, they saw local issues as closely interwoven with international ones, and they argued that there was a compelling reason for this. As the league put it, “Our internationalism is not the child of a crazed enthusiasm for empty phrases … but of the need to take preventive measures, to bolster ourselves against the enemy,” which they identified as “the imperialism of North America.”

Many of Latin America’s radical movements at this time were inspired by the recent example of the Mexican Revolution. The new Mexican Constitution of 1917 had nationalized the country’s land and natural resources, putting it on a collision course with U.S. companies and landowners.

Others still were energized by the global repercussions of the Russian Revolution. This, of course, included several brand-new communist parties across the region. But at the time, many others in Latin America saw the Bolsheviks as part of a global anti-colonial wave.

Mexico City as activist hub

My book explores the key role Mexico City played as a gathering point for these different political tendencies.

They included groups ranging from Mexican peasant leagues to the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, an anti-imperialist movement formed by Peruvian exiles. Many of these organizations converged under the umbrella of the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas. Founded in Mexico City in 1925, it soon had chapters in a dozen more countries across the region.

Between them, these movements brought into focus the novel features of U.S. power. As the Cuban student leader and communist Julio Antonio Mella saw it in 1925 – at a time when his native country was highly dependent on the U.S. but formally sovereign – the U.S. was distinct. Unlike European empires, it largely refrained from direct control of territories, though it had pressed the Cubans to include in their 1901 constitution a provision allowing it to intervene in the island at will.

In Mella’s view, the U.S. was clearly an empire, one that mainly exercised its dominance through commercial or financial pressures. For him, the dollar and Wall Street were as central to U.S. power as the halls of government in Washington, D.C.

For Ricardo Paredes, an Ecuadorean doctor who founded the country’s Socialist Party in 1926, a new term was required to capture Latin American countries’ contradictory position. Formally sovereign, they were not colonies as such. Yet they were economically and politically subordinated to Washington and Wall Street – “dependent countries,” as he phrased it in 1928.

For the Peruvian poet Magda Portal, a leading member of the anti-imperialist American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, U.S. dominance played out differently in different parts of Latin America.

In a series of lectures she gave in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in 1929, Portal divided the region into zones. While countries such as Argentina or Brazil were mainly sites for U.S. investment, Mexico and the Caribbean were regularly subjected to U.S. military force. Or, as Portal put it, “Here imperialism wears no disguise.”

Portal concluded her lectures with a phrase that combined her analysis of U.S. dominance with a resonant appeal for unity: “We have a single and great enemy; let us form a single and great union.”

United states of resistance?

Yet while there was much Latin American anti-imperialist thinkers could agree on, there were also profound divergences between them. This included questions of strategy as well as issues of principle. What role should different classes play in their movement? How radical a transformation of society were they pushing for? And what kind of state should emerge from it?

Over time, these differences turned into deep rifts that pitted revolutionaries against democratic reformists, internationalists against nationalists, and pro-Soviets against anti-communists. These disagreements played an important role in Latin American politics over the rest of the century.

While many of these rifts became especially prominent during the Cold War, they developed out of earlier divisions over how best to counter U.S. dominance.

The anti-imperialist upsurge of the 1920s and ’30s was formative for a generation of Latin American radicals. Several of those who entered political life during these years went on to play key roles in major events of the 20th century. Raúl Roa, for example, who served as foreign secretary for Cuba’s revolutionary government from 1959 to 1976, was first politicized in the island’s anti-imperialist movement of the 1920s.

The men and women whose political visions were formed in the interwar period carried those ideals forward into the Cold War era. In important ways, the 1920s and 1930s laid vital groundwork for later and better-known radical movements.

Past is, of course, not always prologue. It is impossible to predict what the long-term consequences of current U.S. policy in Latin America will be, especially given the rightward tilt that is currently unfolding across the region.

But looking at the region’s anti-imperialist traditions does point to one possible outcome: The U.S.’s newly aggressive stance will, sooner rather than later, fuel a resurgence of anti-imperialist sentiment as the organizing principle for a new generation of activists.

Tony Wood does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

“¡Ándale! ¡Ándale! ¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!”

Meaning “hurry up, let’s go,” the trademark slogan of Speedy Gonzales was, for generations of children, the first Spanish words they learned.

But by the 1980s, ABC had pulled his cartoons due to concerns that his dress, accent and characters like his cousin, Slowpoke Rodriguez, were insensitive toward Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The Cartoon Network followed suit in 1999.

I’ve studied and written about the history of animation, including how characters have been received around the world. Though rooted in a well-intentioned effort at cultural sensitivity, taking Speedy Gonzales off the air was a step too far for many viewers. He was one of the few cartoon characters rooted in Mexican identity, and he’d become a cultural icon across all of Latin America. The ensuing uproar in the wake of his cancellation prompted the Cartoon Network to reinstate the cartoon mouse in 2002.

With Warner Bros. greenlighting a new Speedy Gonzales movie in January 2026, the character’s redemption arc appears complete.

A speedy rise to stardom

“The fastest mouse in all of Mexico” first appeared in the 1953 animated short “Cat-Tails for Two.”

He was redesigned with his iconic yellow sombrero and red kerchief when he starred in his eponymous 1955 film, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short.

The short film features the general framework for future plots: Speedy helps members of his border community – a place inspired by Ciudad Juarez, just south of El Paso, Texas – evade the conniving Sylvester the Cat.

It opens with a town of starving mice looking longingly at the AJAX cheese factory through a fence establishing an “international border.” They try to determine who will try to outrun Sylvester, the factory’s guard. One of the mice says that his sister is friends with Speedy Gonzales. (Another pipes in that Speedy is friends with everybody’s sister, signaling Speedy as something of a Don Juan.) After they call on Speedy, he uses his speed and smarts to outrun and outwit Sylvester.

The basic premise also appears in a number of cartoons, from Tom and Jerry to Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote: An antagonist is consistently thwarted by a clever protagonist who avoids increasingly complicated traps and attempts at capture.

Speedy Gonzales is unique, though, in that he was the first cartoon star to be from a Latin American country.

In the 1940s, with the European and Asian markets cut off due to World War II, Disney had turned to the Latin American market. The studio produced “Saludos Amigos” in 1942 and “The Three Caballeros” in 1944 to abide by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, which aimed to leverage diplomacy, trade and cultural exchange to improve relations with Latin America.

Speedy ended up appearing in 45 theatrical shorts. In 1969, Warner Bros. shut down its animation studio, but the character lived on in Saturday morning cartoon anthologies like “The Bugs Bunny Show,” which repackaged older cartoons for younger audiences.

Animation’s racial reckoning

The Cartoon Network pulled Speedy Gonzales from the air at a time when networks and studios were starting to reassess animated characters from earlier eras.

Many early cartoon characters, including Mickey Mouse, had been modeled after blackface minstrel characters. Warner Bros.‘ first star, Bosko, was originally patented as “Negro Boy.”

Since racist tropes were ubiquitous in early-20th-century animation, films and shorts like Disney’s “Dumbo,” “Mickey’s Mellerdrammer” or Warner Bros.’ “All This and Rabbit Stew” were either pulled, edited or updated to feature a content warning.

But after The Cartoon Network pulled Speedy Gonzales from the air in 1999, there was unexpected pushback from the Hispanic American community and the character’s Latin American fans. Groups like League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest Hispanic civil rights organization in the United States, declared Speedy a cultural icon and requested that his cartoons return to the air.

Back when Speedy Gonzales was first introduced to audiences, Hollywood had been filming more movies in Mexico and at the U.S.-Mexico border. However, most of these films depicted Latinos as either incompetent or villains.

In this regard, Speedy represented something different. Though the character’s English speech and accent reflected stereotypes – and he was voiced by a white actor, Mel Blanc – the character was ultimately a clever, quick-witted and good-natured protagonist. And the Spanish dubbing of his cartoons in Latin America had removed the stereotypical accent altogether.

Let the people decide

The trajectory of Speedy Gonzales resembles that of another controversial cartoon character: Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from “The Simpsons.”

An Indian immigrant who earned his Ph.D. in computer science in his home country, Apu becomes the manager of a convenience store in the U.S.

Some critics viewed Apu’s depiction as problematic; voiced by a white actor, Hank Azaria, Apu’s exaggerated Indian-American accent and catchphrase – “Thank you, come again” – was routinely mimicked and mocked by viewers of the show. Others, however, saw Apu as the embodiment of the American Dream: He was intelligent, hardworking and morally grounded.

Cultural theorists like Jacques Derrida and Stuart Hall have written about the complexities of how audiences understand – and either resist or embrace – what they read and watch. They ultimately argue that viewers and readers often interpret media however they see fit, regardless of the creators’ intent. For example, many minority groups who are underrepresented or misrepresented in popular culture will nonetheless find their own meaning and inspiration in characters, even if those characters weren’t supposed to represent those groups in the first place.

This happened with “The Goofy Movie.” Some audiences went on to describe the 1995 film as Disney’s first “Black” animated feature, despite the fact that the characters’ race is never mentioned. There were hints, of course: Black R&B singer Tevin Campbell played the movie’s fictional pop star, Powerline, and the themes of fatherhood and generational tensions eerily echo those in the play “Fences,” written by Black playwright August Wilson.

Of course, in the case of a character like Speedy Gonzales, depictions can become more nuanced as cultural norms and sensitivities change. Jorge R. Gutiérrez is set to direct the animated feature. If his work on films like “The Book of Life” is any indication, he’ll be well-equipped to bring cultural awareness to the animated feature – even if Speedy continues to sport his big, floppy sombrero.

Jared Bahir Browsh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.