When a person goes for a consultation with a psychologist, he already has some vague portrait of a specialist in his imagination. And, first of all, he sees the gender of the person. Does it matter who advises you, a man or a woman? Of course it does, and it’s quite large. And this choice does not depend on the professionalism of the psychologist, but on your overall attitude towards people of your own and the opposite sex. Therefore, here I will not provide instructions on choosing the gender of a consulting psychologist, but will talk about the stereotypes of society’s perception of this specialist. Unfortunately, today in any profession things are such that preference is given to a male specialist. Men are more valued for several reasons. Firstly, there are fewer of them. Although nature itself has made sure that more boys are born into the world than girls, due to various reasons, over time there are equal numbers of us, and then even fewer of us. And what is less in nature is valued more. Children grow up mainly in women's groups: they are raised by mothers and grandmothers, female educators, and taught by female teachers. Then adult men find themselves in a female team at work - if they are not military, not miners or not metallurgists. There are also more women among psychologists, but if we talk about successful psychologists (for example, in our city of Cherepovets), then most likely we will talk about men. This happens not because they are more professional, talented, smart than women, but rather due to their social upbringing: from childhood, boys’ parents focus on success in the profession, while girls, on the contrary, are tied to housework and raising children. everything else, most men are not satisfied with the modest title of psychologist, and they prefer to call themselves nothing more than a psychotherapist. Meanwhile, there are formal criteria for who has the right to call themselves that and who does not. Many do this to raise their professional status in the eyes of clients. Further, in society, men are assigned a set of so-called purely masculine qualities: intelligence, strength, restraint, reticence, reliability. Male psychologists are more trusted. It is believed that they can keep what is said secret, since they supposedly do not tend to gossip. They, as a rule, operate less with the category of feelings and pay more attention to the rational grain in behavior. How do city residents perceive a female psychologist? A small sociological survey among a hundred people showed that the majority of men and women still prefer to go for a consultation with a woman, slightly fewer men and women said that this issue is not important for them, and the smallest part of the audience would like to consult only with a man .My female psychologist friends were surprised by these results, since they were sure that potential clients would rather go to a male psychologist. When I began to clarify the reason for such responses from the population, it turned out that they were based not on stereotypes of perception of men and women, but on objective differences between the sexes. And they lie precisely in what we work with the client to a greater extent: with his feelings or an appeal to rational thinking. After all, one of the main needs is to talk about painful things and thereby alleviate your emotional state. After all, it is known that when feelings take over, a person’s mind does not work, and it is useless to build his behavior on the basis of logical calculations. A woman psychologist, due to her upbringing and gender characteristics, reacts more subtly to a person’s emotional sphere, thereby creating a feeling of acceptance and understanding, which does not always happen during a consultation with a man. From this perspective, a student joke about male and female psychologists sounds quite understandable: “A female psychologist is not a psychologist, a male psychologist is not a man.” After all, they go to a consultation for the emotional support that they are waiting for.