It’s fairly common knowledge that the gender balance of a profession and the pay in that profession are correlated. Jobs populated primarily by women pay less, on average, than those populated primarily by men. But it’s rare to get a clear sense of why that’s the case. The therapy world offers a rare exception. It used to be that most therapists were men. Today, the overwhelming majority are women — and pay is meaningfully lower. But we actually know which change came first.
gender
Handling sexist comments in therapy
There is a huge gender gap in the field of psychotherapy. At least 80% of psychotherapists in the US are women. So when a man pursues therapy, unless he specifically seeks out a man, he will most likely get a woman therapist. The dynamic of a male client with a female therapist can be both beneficial and problematic to the therapy. It can spark discussion over issues the client did not realize were there until working with a woman. It can replicate his relationship with another woman in his life. It also can reveal sexist beliefs.
Boy trouble
A discussion of Kay Hymowitz’s Manning Up and Leonard Sax’s Boys Adrift.
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While men have long been stereotyped as perpetual teenagers, a swath of recent books and articles have expressed rising concern about the failure of boys and young men in the United States to achieve traditional markers of adulthood. Young men appear to be falling behind young women in educational achievement, meaningful careers, and social relationships, and often seem unmotivated to move forward in their lives.
I have been reading both Kay Hymowitz’s Manning Up and Leonard Sax’s Boys Adrift, two books that take jarringly different perspectives on what is happening to boys and young men in America, and what needs to be done about it.
As a social critic, Hymowitz is unconvincing. Manning Up reads like more like the off-the-rails final essay from her Marriage and Caste in America than the sharp, concise and well-supported other essays that led up to it. In Manning Up, Hymowitz far too frequently relies on anecdotes as evidence, as if Sex and the City reflected the average American woman’s daily life. Manning Up displays assumptions about feminism and suggestions about men that Hymowitz never bothers to defend, like the notion that men marrying at later ages is bad for women and society. The book is not as shrill as some of its Amazon reviews would have you believe, but neither is it particularly strong in landing its argument. That argument essentially is that feminism is to blame for the struggles of boys and young men, but it is up to men to adapt to the changing world, and they’re dropping the ball so far.
Boys Adrift is a welcome contrast. It frames the problems American boys are facing in the context of five causes: Video games, teaching methods, prescription drugs, environmental toxins, and devaluation of masculinity. Some of those proposed causes may strike you as questionable at first (that was certainly my reaction), but Sax lays out the research on each quite well.
Perhaps more importantly, the tone of the book is right. Sax strikes the difficult balance between objective researcher and social activist, landing somewhere in the neighborhood of a concerned, but not panicked, parent. Boys Adrift is clear and convincing, and while it makes a number of public policy arguments, it focuses primarily on what parents and family members can do to ensure their own sons are the motivated and active young men we would all want them to be.
By simply confirming what some may want to believe about men, Hymowitz is likely to enjoy higher sales. But Sax wrote the better book.
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What are your thoughts on the struggles boys are facing in the United States? Have either of these books, or others, changed your thinking? Your comments are welcomed. You can also email me at ben[at]bencaldwell[dot]com, or share your reactions via Twitter.
Does it matter that 80% of MFT interns are women?
If you have been to see a therapist lately, I’d bet good money I can guess the therapist’s gender based on their licensure. You saw a psychiatrist? Probably male (75 percent as of 1996, though declining since). Anything else? Probably female. The shift among psychologists has been most overwhelming: 72 percent of 2005 doctorates were women, compared to just over 20 percent in 1970. Clinical social workers, professional counselors, and family therapists are all likely to be women.
It would be naive, at best, to say that women are more naturally drawn than men to “helping professions.” Lots of professions could be categorized as “helping,” including surgery — one profession that is still fairly gender-balanced. So what actually causes the discrepancies in psychotherapy?
Education. In social work and family therapy, the female majority continues to swell, due in no small part to larger trends in education. Women are now significantly more likely than men to start college, finish college, and go on to graduate school. In California, among those who have their graduate degrees and are working toward licensure as MFTs, a whopping 83 percent are women. An even larger 86 percent of those working toward clinical social work licenses are women.
Money. Are men staying out of these professions for simple economic reasons, the same reasons they seem to stay away from craft-selling web sites? Perhaps. Some evidence suggests that as professions shift toward higher proportions of women, pay rates in those professions decrease. If men are making career choices based on improving their chances of good pay, family therapy is something of a gamble. Pay averaged about $55,000 per year as of 2002, but varies widely based on work setting. It is certainly possible to make a six-figure salary in the psychotherapy world — I know some who were able to do so even very early in their careers — but it is not common.
Attitudes. Women in medical school in the UK demonstrate more positive attitudes toward mental illness, psychiatry, and psychiatric patients than men do. This mirrors findings from the general population in the US, where men are more likely than women to see mental illness as a personal failure. This issue gets more complicated once other gender stereotypes are thrown into the mix: In one recent study, men and women were both less likely to view “gender-typical” mental health symptoms (a man with alcoholism, a woman with depression) as genuine mental disturbances, and less inclined to help, compared with gender-atypical symptoms.
Relational factors. More than men, women in the US believe it is their responsibility to be caretakers of relationships. This element alone may be enough to explain the disproportionate gender balance in psychotherapy, as women appear to be more attuned to relational issues generally and health issues specifically.
All of these possible explanations lead us to the bigger question: So what?
Does it matter that such a large majority of therapists, especially early-career therapists, are women?
In a word, yes. It matters. It matters because graduate school continues to become more expensive, and if the genderization of the field puts downward pressure on salaries as noted above, it may become harder for therapists to make a living.
It matters because men already are unlikely to come to therapy in spite of its likely benefits; male therapists (and this is certainly arguable) may be better able to convince men to come to therapy, and to stay in therapy long enough to benefit.
It also matters because of the larger message it sends — if men and women truly share responsibility for the success of their marriages and families, how is that message reinforced with a marriage and family therapy profession that is practiced largely by women, for female clients?
Of course, none of this should be read as a value statement about therapists of either gender. We are seeing in the MFT world a trend mirrored throughout higher education and social services professions. It is important that we start asking now what this genderization will mean, whether it is a trend worth trying to change in MFT (certainly not a foregone conclusion; this could be well argued either way), and if so, how that might be done. I welcome your thoughts.
Marriage and the economy
Slate engaged in a bit of a bogus trend story earlier this week, usually something the online magazine makes a habit of mocking. Under the title “Unwashed coffee mugs,” the story aims to educate us on the toll that the faltering economy has taken on marriages.
Let’s start with what the article gets right: 82 percent of the recession’s job losses have been suffered by men. As of last year, 25 percent of wives out-earned their husbands, a number that almost certainly has climbed with recent layoffs. And time-use data does indeed show that after men lose their jobs, they don’t suddenly find themselves inspired to do more housework; instead, “they spend more time sleeping, watching TV, and looking for a job.”
Getting to what that means for marriage, of course, is trickier.
To be sure, money is a common source of conflict in marriages. But the actual effects of recession on divorce rates are not that large:
Census Bureau figures show that over the past 2 1/2 decades, recessions have had only minor effects on divorce rates, which have been slowly waning since the early ’80s after 20 years of steadily rising. Those trajectories have been influenced more by the rise of the women’s movement and women’s earning power, lower fertility and changes in divorce laws than by dour Dows. The only recorded spike in divorces in the past 75 years came right after World War II.
Expect to see a lot more speculation about money and marriage over the next few months — it’s a common (and easy) theme to strike in writing about family life. But bear in mind that there are contradictory forces on families in a recession; they may suffer greater stress as a result of financial woes, sure. They also may be more likely to come together as a family to make it through a difficult time. Beware of stories that draw conclusions beyond what their data can support.