A new sufficient condition for a list of real numbers to be the spectrum of a symmetric doubly stochastic matrix is presented; this is a contribution to the classical spectral inverse problem for symmetric doubly stochastic matrices that is still open in its full generality. It is proved that whenever λ 2 , . . . , λ n are non-positive real numbers with 1 + λ 2 + . . . + λ n 1/2, then there exists a symmetric, doubly stochastic matrix whose spectrum is precisely (1, λ 2 , . . . , λ n ). We point out that this criterion is incomparable to the classical sufficient conditions due to Perfect-Mirsky, Soules, and their modern refinements due to Nadar et al. We also provide some examples and applications of our results.Date: October 22, 2019. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. 65F18 (primary), and 15A18, 15A12 (secondary).