The Vanishing Male Therapist

Things are not looking very good for those who want to see a a gender-neutered workplace. People who traffic in idealistic illusions envision a world where there are roughly equal numbers of men and women in all professions.

When they find a profession where there are not enough women, they take the disparity as that women are suffering gender discrimination.

Anything short of equality must, in their mind’s eye, bespeak prejudice.

In reality, professions tend to be either male of female dominant. There is no such thing as a profession where there is true gender equality.

Over time, most professions have been male dominant. A few, like secretary and nurse, have always been female dominant. Nowadays advertising and marketing have also become more female dominant.

But now, what happens when a formerly male dominant profession becomes feminized? What happens when a large number of women enter a male-dominant profession? Is there a tipping point, a moment when a profession tips over and becomes female-dominant?

Recently, that is what has happened to psychotherapy.

In the past, therapy was a male profession. Now, with more and more women becoming therapists, it has become almost exclusively female.

As more women have entered the field, men have fled it. According to Benedict Carey, male therapists are a vanishing breed. Link here. Most of the male therapists practicing today are greying relics from a bygone age.

As is well known from studies of other professions, as more women enter a profession its prestige diminishes. Along with diminishing prestige comes diminishing income.

Since a man’s place in society is based largely on his prestige and income, this combination has consigned therapy to the world of female dominant professions.

Therapy used to be more like psychiatry, thus a relatively high prestige medical specialization. Now it is more like nursing, a lower prestige profession based on care and nurturing.

Carey asks which comes first: does a profession lose prestige because more women enter it or do fewer men enter it because it has lost prestige? As he points out, the income of therapists has been declining because the insurance companies who pay most fees have chosen to reduce them.

We would have trouble establishing causation, but we do know that there is a correlation: more women correlates with less prestige and less income.

I am old enough to remember a time when more women started entering the field of psychotherapy in larger numbers. They marketed themselves to potential female patients by saying that they understood a woman’s experience better than any man could.

No one seems to have noticed that personal experience is not a professional qualification. Woman therapists might well be more empathic toward other women, but that is not something that is going to be part of your graduate school coursework.

If therapy is merely based on experiences and feelings that you do not learn in a professional school, then naturally professional credentials become devalued.

Since most therapy patients are female, this marketing device worked well. Female patients tended to avoid male therapists, and this tended to discourage men from entering the field.

At the same time, therapy has tended to promote womanly values, values that are associated with feelings and emotion. Concomitantly it has failed to understand the importance of aggression and competition in male experience.

Its terms have been male unfriendly. No man is going to spend too much time with a therapist who is telling him to get in touch with his feelings.

Feminism also played a role. By defining women as an oppressed and victimized class, and defining men as an oppressive patriarchy, feminists taught women not to trust men. If men are conditioned to exploit women, no woman should ever expect that a male therapist will have her best interest at heart.

Unfortunately, this gender realignment did not necessarily serve women well. As more and more women entered the workplace, they did not really need a therapist who was feeling their pain. They needed therapists who grasped the reality of the workplace, who especially understood how it differed from the boudoir or the nursery.

If you share someone’s humiliation you will have that much more difficulty developing a plan to overcome it.

Now, Benedict Carey explains, with fewer male therapists, men are having more difficulty finding male therapists.

Apparently, we must now bemoan the fact that men who need help cannot get help.

Pardon me if I do not agree. If therapy has become a female dominant profession, then perhaps this is a good thing for men. I see it as a blessing in disguise.

Is it not better that men avoid venues that do not welcome them and do not respect their experience? Isn’t it better that men be discouraged from working with therapists who might well try to make them into something other than what they are?

I say it is.