An article yesterday in the New York Times entitled Need Therapy? A Good Man Is Hard to Find deals with one issue that I'm guessing wouldn't surprise too many people:
Men earn only one in five of all master’s degrees awarded in psychology, down from half in the 1970s. They account for less than 10 percent of social workers under the age of 34, according to a recent survey. And their numbers have dwindled among professional counselors — to 10 percent of the American Counseling Association’s membership today from 30 percent in 1982 — and appear to be declining among marriage and family therapists.
I wonder if you'd bump into phrasing like the following when observing that there are more male than female computer scientists:
The impact of this gender switch on the value of therapy is negligible, studies suggest. A good therapist is a good therapist, male or female, and a mediocre one is a mediocre one. Shared experience may even be an impediment
What the article seems to suggest though is that a lot of potential clients aren't as comfortable speaking with female therapists and that they see the world from a somewhat different perspective.
I'll be less cynical about programs intended to achieve a gender balance when that's actually what they aim to achieve. For the most part they're like the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index:
Our aim is to focus on whether the gap between women and men in the chosen variables has declined, rather than whether women are “winning” the “battle of the sexes”. Hence, the Index rewards countries that reach the point where outcomes for women equal those for men, but it neither rewards nor penalizes cases in which women are outperforming men in particular variables.
