I remember the day as if it were a meme that I cannot scrub from my phone’s library: master’s selection interviews. Ask any psychology graduate, and they will tell you about the ritual of waiting rooms and the cruel arithmetic of limited places.
On that day, 20 applicants sat in a room heavy with the smell of nerves that was so apparent, it did not require a psychologist to diagnose. As soon as the selection process began, I quickly scanned the room to count the number of males. Somewhere deep in my gut, I knew that my competition for admission was not the 16 female candidates, but rather my fellow male applicants.
Weeks later, my intuition was confirmed. There was only one chair at a table that once belonged mostly to men. The chair was mine, and I should have felt triumphant, but a colder question trailed me. Where are the men in psychology?
Walk into a lecture hall, a hospital therapy wing, or a professional conference in South Africa, and the pattern is quiet but clear. Women constitute the majority of psychologists, with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) reporting that roughly one in five registered psychologists are male. There are many plausible reasons for this, but gender expectations and gender stereotypes are cited as major contributors.
Social expectations shape the careers children imagine for themselves. Boys are nudged towards analytical fields, while girls are steered towards helping professions. And when a young man dares to say he wants to study psychology, he is often met with smirks and the soft violence of humour.
“Going to listen to stories all day?” “Male psychologists are all gay, right?” “So, you are the sensitive type?” “Isn’t that for women?”
These comments are offered as a joke, but they function as a fence. They keep men out of a field where their presence could save lives, not with a scalpel, but by helping to break the silence.
The problem is the balance
This is not an attack on women in the field. Many are excellent. Most of my lecturers, mentors, supervisors and colleagues are women, and I owe them a great deal. The problem is the balance. When too few men enter the profession, psychological theory begins to tilt, and the field looks even more like a “women’s job”. That image then keeps more men out, creating a loop that continuously tightens.
This matters because we often speak about a crisis in male mental health. We run campaigns about depression and suicide, yet we rarely question the shape of the room where healing is meant to happen. How do we call men to therapy when the profession itself is coded as feminine?
I have worked with teenage boys shaped by online rage and false certainty, with quiet men who work with their hands and carry their fathers’ silence, with township sons who only speak when they recognise themselves not just in the theory, but in the therapist. Then a sentence cracks open, a jaw unclenches, and the first honest line arrives. The shift is not magic, but it is recognition. Sometimes, all a man needs is to see his struggle reflected by another man.
Representation is not a slogan; rather, it is a clinical need. Boys and men deserve a choice of therapist. They deserve to see different ways of being a man. Men of colour matter even more in this landscape. If you grew up in Lenasia, Soweto, Eldorado Park, Mitchells Plain, Khayelitsha or any South African suburb, you know the load that race and culture place on a boy’s shoulders.
There are dialects in our streets and homes that never make it into textbooks. There is the language of humour that hides pain, of faith that steadies or unsettles, of the rules you learn on the pavement. We need psychologists who can interpret those languages from the inside.
A black university student walking the tightrope of excellence and survivor’s guilt needs to sit with a clinician who knows the terrain. An Indian teenager negotiating family honour and private despair needs a mirror that does not distort him. This is not identity politics; clinicians call it cultural competence.
People ask how I can listen to problems all day. The answer lies in the fulfilment I get from the profession, knowing the impact I can make as a straight male in the profession.
I watch a man discover that his numbness has a name and that names can be worked with. I witness a teenager trade contempt for curiosity. I see a husband say, “I was wrong,” and mean it. I hear the first prayer of a man who thought he had forgotten how. Therapy does not have to be a demotion from manhood; it can be a repair of it.
So what needs to change?
Schools and universities must speak about psychology to boys as a potential and value-laden profession with real social impact. The media must stop turning male feelings into spectacle. And faith leaders and community elders must remind young men that wisdom includes the courage to know the self.
We need to stop whispering about the crisis and start constructing solutions.
That means targeted bursaries that open university doors for male psychologists, especially men of colour, and bind them to our communities.
It means mentorship pipelines that pair young men with practising clinicians who can model a new kind of strength.
It means curriculum tweaks in every psychology department that treat male help-seeking norms as a matter of cultural competence, not resistance.
And finally, it means campaigns that walk off the pink posters and into the trade schools and football clubs, rebranding psychological literacy. This is the infrastructure of healing we must build now.
Most of all, we need men to walk in. Not as saviours, but as servants of healing and courage. We need men of colour to take up space in clinics, campuses and community centres. We need them to bring their languages, their humour, their scars and their scholarship.
If the thought has crossed your mind, even once, do not brush it aside. If you are the friend people confide in, if you find yourself reading strangers on buses and in queues, if you are angry at how boys are breaking under the weight of unsaid things, pay attention to that pull. There is room for you in psychology. Not as a token, but as a voice and a witness and a craftsman of change.
If you want to explore the path, speak to a psychologist you trust. Sit in on a lecture. Shadow a mental health practitioner. Or reach out to me. The chair is not reserved for someone else. It has your name on it, if you dare to want it. DM
This article is based on a research study conducted by the author titled: Why psychology? An investigation into the career motivations of male psychologists practising in Johannesburg.