A simple policy corrected pervasive gender imbalance in Ph.D. awards at Dutch university

From ScienceMag:

A Dutch university has successfully closed the gender gap in Ph.D. students graduating with honors—with potential lessons for other institutions looking to correct gender imbalances in academia.

Outstanding Ph.D. students in the Netherlands and a handful of other countries can be awarded their degrees cum laude. But after the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) realized women were half as likely as men to receive this award, it quietly overhauled its policy, requiring thesis committees to recommend students for the award rather than their thesis advisers. Last week, TU/e released data in the Dutch newspaper Trouw showing the new policy has worked.

The results are “heartening to see,” says Kuheli Dutt, assistant dean of community engagement and student relations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose own work has revealed differences in letters of recommendation for men and women on the postdoc job market. Although the cum laude award is not widespread internationally, the results suggest the university was able to mitigate bias by introducing a process with more transparency and careful deliberation of candidates’ merits, she says—something other institutions could learn from.

The university realized its cum laude awards were a problem in 2018, when the Dutch newspaper NRC published an analysis of the gap at a range of Dutch universities. It showed that 7.7% of men Ph.D. students at TU/e were awarded cum laude, compared with 3.3% of women students. Processes to recommend students for the award differ between universities, and TU/e administrators noticed institutions with a smaller gap tended not to give this power solely to the student’s head adviser, who is usually a senior member of their department, says René van Donkelaar, dean of TU/e’s doctoral school.

So TU/e changed the procedure, asking each member of the thesis committee—made up of academics from other institutions—to note whether they thought a Ph.D. thesis was suitable for the award. The adviser as well as a university cum laude committee could then agree or disagree with the assessment.

TU/e’s data show an immediate swing in the awards. In 2018, 2.6% of women graduating with Ph.D.s received the award; in 2019, this shot up to 10.1%. Numbers for both men and women have varied in subsequent years, but are generally close to parity, with women receiving slightly more awards than men in some years.

“I think it’s an example other universities should follow,” says University of Manchester sociologist Jessica Gagnon, who researches diversity in science, technology, engineering, and math. Attempts to close diversity gaps often stall at the phase of data collection, she says, so it’s inspiring to see an institute putting in place corrective policies. “We’re stuck spinning our wheels at the first step of finding out there’s a problem.” But this is just a start, she adds; if advisers were playing such a significant role in the cum laude gap, it’s worth exploring whether students are being treated differently in other ways.

With declining funding for science in some countries—including the United States—competition will increase, says Julie Posselt, a higher education researcher at the University of Southern California. “And usually when competition increases, so does inequality.” That makes it crucial for institutions to find ways to address imbalances, she says. The results from TU/e suggest the question of who evaluates performance is critical—and shows it’s important to dissect existing processes to see what could be going wrong.

TU/e has changed several other gender-related policies, including the introduction of fellowships initially open only to women applicants in faculties with a severe gender imbalance. This makes it difficult to tease apart exactly what caused the cum laude gender gap to close, says Thijs Bol, a sociologist at the University of Amsterdam whose work has explored the causes of the gap. It’s possible that more women professors or a greater awareness of biases at the university played a role, he says.

TU/e published its data after the University of Twente (UTwente), also in the Netherlands, announced on 7 November it had culled the cum laude distinction altogether because there, too, men were twice as likely to receive it. “We thought it was a sad decision,” Van Donkelaar says, because excellent students deserve the recognition. But the distinction was inherently subjective, and the process of awarding it had “several other imperfections,” says UTwente spokesperson Laurens van der Velde. Bol agrees. Subjectivity leads to “perverse effects, particularly for minorities,” and it would be better for Dutch universities to follow UTwente’s example and ditch cum laude, he says. “I would rather invest that time in making better procedures for things we actually do need competition for, such as research funding and positions.”

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