Gender inequality in ‘cum laude’ distinctions for PhD students

Resource allocation in academia is highly skewed, and peer evaluation is the main method used to distribute scarce resources. A large literature documents gender inequality, and the explanation for this inequality is homophily: male evaluators give more favorable ratings to male candidates. We investigate this by focusing on ‘cum laude’ distinctions for PhD students in the Netherlands, a distinction that is only awarded to 5 percent of all dissertations and has as its sole goal to distinguish the top from the rest. Using data from over 5,000 PhD recipients of a large Dutch university for the period 2011-2021, we find that female PhD students were almost two times less likely to get a ‘cum laude’ distinction than their male counterparts, even when they had the same doctoral advisor. This gender gap is largest when dissertations are evaluated by all-male committees and decreases as evaluation committees include more female members.