We suggest that text readability plays an important role in driving consumer engagement on social media. Consistent with a processing fluency account, we find that easy‐to‐read posts are more liked, commented on, and shared on social media. We analyze over 4,000 Facebook posts from Humans of New York, a popular photography blog on social media, over a 3‐year period to see how readability shapes social media engagement. The results hold when controlling for photo features, story valence, and other content‐related characteristics. Experimental findings further demonstrate the causal impact of readability and the processing fluency mechanism in the context of a fictitious brand community. This research articulates the impact of processing fluency on brief word‐of‐mouth transmissions in the real world while empirically demonstrating that readability as a message feature matters. It also extends the impact of processing fluency to a novel behavioral outcome: commenting and sharing actions.

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Increasing the number of female evaluators could help female candidates if evaluators prefer candidates of their own gender. I study whether there is any evidence of such preferences with a unique data set containing 10,500 scores given by 105 evaluators to 3,500 students in the humanities and social sciences who applied for a doctoral scholarship. On average, I find very weak evidence of same-gender preferences for male evaluators ( p = 0.133). To better understand this effect, I also study same-gender preferences across the distribution of candidates, in subcommittees with different gender composition, and for evaluators from different disciplines. I show that male evaluators give higher scores to strong male candidates relative to those given by female evaluators. At the same time, male evaluators give higher scores to male candidates than do female evaluators when there is only one male evaluator in the subcommittee. The representation of men in a discipline does not seem to affect the scores given by evaluators. Overall, there is no clear evidence that replacing a male evaluator with a female one would help female candidates.

To better understand the added-value of the academic evaluation process, this paper studies the relationship between scores given by 105 evaluators to 1900 doctoral candidates who received a scholarship and their outcomes 10 years after the competition. I first find that a one point increase in total score is associated with a 1.4 percentage point (2.1% of a s.e.) increase in the probability of completing a Ph.D. in 5 years, with a 1.0 percentage point (2.1% of a s.e.) increase in the probability of completing a Ph.D. in 10 years, and with a 1.4 percentage point increase (3% of a s.e.) in the probability of becoming a tenuretrack professor 10 years after the competition. I then use the individual evaluator-candidate scores to provide evidence that male evaluators give higher scores than do female evaluators to students who complete their doctoral program in 5 years. Since there is no difference between scores given by male and female evaluators to candidates who become tenure-track professors, male evaluators seem more focused on shorter time to degree than are female evaluators.