Almost fifty percent of female PhD students face inappropriate behaviours

Statistics Netherlands asked researchers about how they look back on their PhD journeys. Some concerning figures emerged: 44 per cent of women with a PhD report having experienced inappropriate behaviours during their PhD programme. The percentage is much lower among men: 26 per cent. Most of these women were on the receiving end of bullying, discrimination and threats. One in ten of them dealt with sexual harassment.

© HOP. Source: CBS. Figures based on PhD graduates over the past 10 years. Men are represented in dark blue and women in light blue. The bars represent excessive workload, inappropriate behaviour, bullying, discrimination, verbal aggression, threats or intimidation, and sexual harassment.

The perpetrator may be a professor, a fellow PhD student, or someone with whom the PhD candidate “has met as part of the PhD programme”. The figures do not provide any further details on the perpetrators.

A cause for concern
“This is truly concerning,” says Martijn van der Meer, chair of the Dutch PhD Network. “Almost one in two women and 25 percent of men deal with this type of behaviour. That is a lot.”

According to him, this shows that all the attention being paid to social safety in higher education and academia is justified. He welcomes the Social Safety programme, which offers grants for sound initiatives in this area.

Workload
In addition, the workload for PhD candidates has increased in recent years. CBS has no previous figures on misconduct, but it does have figures on workload. In 2019, CBS conducted a survey on PhD graduates' workloads.

In 2019, 60 per cent of PhD graduates reported a high or very high workload. In 2025, 68 per cent did so. Workloads are higher among women (72 per cent) than among men (63 per cent).

Van der Meer is fed up with this situation: “Over the past five years, we have raised a lot of awareness of PhD candidates' workloads. Still, we are not seeing a decrease, but rather an increase.”

Satisfied
Despite the problems, 86 per cent of recent PhD graduates look back on the process with general satisfaction. The assessment was more favourable in 2019, when 93 per cent of respondents were satisfied in retrospect. Men rate the experience slightly more positively than women, but the difference is not significant.