Do Men Face Prejudice?
A dissertation that reveals what the APA quietly overlook
Do Men Face Prejudice?
A dissertation that reveals what the APA quietly overlook
The American Psychological Association likes to remind us that psychology should be guided by empathy, cultural awareness, and respect for lived experience. Few would argue with that. These values are written directly into the APA Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men, published in 2018.
On paper, the Guidelines sound humane and thoughtful. They urge psychologists to be gender-sensitive, to avoid stereotyping, to understand the social contexts shaping boys’ and men’s lives, and to guard against bias that might harm the therapeutic alliance.
All good things.
But there is an important question we almost never ask:
What happens when those principles are applied fully and consistently to men — including the possibility that men themselves may be targets of prejudice?
A largely unknown doctoral dissertation from 2020 offers a surprisingly clear answer.
A brief introduction most people never received
In 2020, psychologist Aman Siddiqi completed a doctoral dissertation titled A Clinical Guide to Discussing Prejudice Against Men. It was submitted quietly, without media attention or controversy, and has remained largely invisible outside academic circles.
That is unfortunate — because it does something rare.
Rather than arguing politics or ideology, Siddiqi does something very simple and very professional: He takes the existing psychological science on prejudice and asks whether it applies to men.
Not rhetorically. Clinically.
He does not invent new standards. He does not dismiss women’s issues. Instead, he asks whether psychologists may be overlooking an entire category of harm because it doesn’t fit the dominant narrative.
And in doing so, his work quietly exposes a tension at the heart of the APA Guidelines themselves.
What the APA Guidelines say — and what they assume
The APA Guidelines for Boys and Men emphasize several themes that many clinicians will recognize:
Boys and men are shaped by restrictive gender norms
Emotional suppression harms mental health
Masculinity can be socially reinforced in unhealthy ways
Psychologists should challenge stereotypes and build empathy
All of that may be true — as far as it goes.
But notice something subtle.
The Guidelines overwhelmingly frame men as:
Shaped by norms
Socialized into restriction
Influenced by expectations
What they almost never frame men as is this:
Targets of prejudice.
This matters more than it might seem.
Why “prejudice” is not the same as “socialization”
Siddiqi’s dissertation makes a distinction that is obvious once you see it — and strangely absent from much of clinical training.
Socialization asks:
“What messages did you absorb growing up?”
Prejudice asks:
“How are you perceived, judged, dismissed, or morally framed by others right now?”
These are not the same thing.
A man may be distressed not only because he learned to suppress emotion — but because when he does express vulnerability, he is:
Not believed
Seen as dangerous
Treated as less worthy of care
Assumed to be at fault
The APA Guidelines speak at length about helping men change themselves.
Siddiqi asks whether psychology has done enough to question how men are viewed.
That shift alone is quietly radical.
The empathy gap we don’t name
One of the strongest parts of Siddiqi’s work is his discussion of what he calls the male gender empathy gap — the tendency to respond less sympathetically to male suffering, especially when it conflicts with familiar narratives.
This is not framed as cruelty. It is framed as normalization.
Some prejudices persist not because people hate a group — but because dismissing that group’s suffering has become socially acceptable.
Siddiqi outlines several mechanisms that maintain this acceptability:
Trivialization (“It’s not that serious.”)
Denial (“That doesn’t really happen.”)
Justification (“There must be a reason.”)
Intimidation (“You can’t say that.”)
If you’ve worked with men long enough, you’ve heard these dynamics described — often haltingly — in the therapy room.
The APA Guidelines warn clinicians not to invalidate clients.
Siddiqi shows how invalidation happens when male distress falls outside approved frames.
When good intentions become blind spots
Perhaps the most uncomfortable implication of Siddiqi’s dissertation is this:
Clinicians themselves may unintentionally participate in prejudice against men — precisely because their training never gave them a framework to recognize it.
When a man describes feeling:
Disbelieved in a conflict
Treated as disposable
Assumed to be dangerous
Morally pre-judged
A well-meaning therapist may instinctively:
Reframe the experience
Redirect responsibility
Minimize the injury
Interpret it as defensiveness or entitlement
Not out of malice — but out of habit.
The APA Guidelines urge psychologists to be self-reflective about bias.
Siddiqi asks whether psychology has reflected deeply enough on its gender asymmetries.
A question the Guidelines never quite ask
The APA is comfortable naming androcentrism — male-centered bias — in culture.
Siddiqi raises a quieter question:
What happens when cultural sympathy flows primarily in one direction?
He uses the term gynocentrism not as an accusation, but as a descriptive lens — a way of understanding how concern, protection, and moral framing may cluster unevenly.
Whether one accepts the term or not, the phenomenon it points to is familiar to many men:
Female suffering is presumed legitimate
Male suffering is often contextualized, explained, or doubted
The APA Guidelines never directly address this imbalance.
Siddiqi does — calmly, clinically, and without rhetoric.
Why this matters now
In recent years, we’ve seen growing concern about:
Male loneliness
Male suicide
Boys disengaging from school
Men dropping out of institutions
Many responses still default to:
“Men need to open up.”
“Men need to change.”
“Men need better coping skills.”
Those may help.
But Siddiqi’s dissertation suggests something deeper:
If we never examine how men are seen, we will keep asking men to adapt to environments that quietly misperceive them.
The APA Guidelines aim to help boys and men.
Siddiqi’s work asks what those guidelines truly require — if we apply them without exemptions.
A final thought
This dissertation does not reject psychology’s values.
It takes them seriously.
And in doing so, it reveals a simple, uncomfortable possibility:
We may believe we are being fair to men — while still failing to see them clearly.
That is not an accusation.
It is an invitation.
And it is one psychology would do well to accept.
The Thesis
Aman’s academia.edu page
It is nice to see this work being shared. These points about the treatment of men:
Trivialization (“It’s not that serious.”)
Denial (“That doesn’t really happen.”)
Justification (“There must be a reason.”)
Intimidation (“You can’t say that.”)
sum up how men's concerns are treated generally. Look at the treatment of claims of sexual harassment and rape. We are told to believe all women and never to require them to actually support their claims with evidence or afford the accused with the presumption of innocence (unless the accused is a woman of course). Men who raise the possibility (indeed the extreme probability) of false accusations and the legal and ethical requirement of the presumption of innocence will be hit immediately with the 4 claims above. What is most concerning is that those in charge of Codes of Conduct, Title IX offices and human resources are the most extremely anti-maile in using these 4 mechanisms of deflect even the possibility that the man is innocent and that the woman is actually a fraud.
When women's groups are confronted about the reverse of the female demand that MEN intervene on behalf of women by requiring that women have the same duty to due process, fairness and justice to men, the men will immediately be dismissed and told that men have to form their own organizations to do such "work". Of course, if such a group were to be formed it would immediately be attacked as misogynist for not centering WOMEN's needs.
The 4 steps of dismissing male concerns apply to any area where public resources/benefits are on the table. At the University of New Hampshire in the 1990's the institution had recently hired a new director of Diversity whose duties included being the person responsible for the university conduct system and ensuring compliance with all equal opportunity laws/policies. I served as a graduate student on the hiring committee. One of the 4 candidates we interviewed seemed well qualified and willing to perform the job fairly to all. 2 were questionable and 1 was clearly unqualified by displaying blatant feminist bias against men. This last woman was the person hired of course despite my clear written warnings about the bias she appeared to bring to the position. My words proved prophetic in the first year when she faced a challenge.
The university had long faced issues with sufficient housing in the small town of Durham. While many students lived in adjacent towns which were connected by a good university run bus system, the underlying housing situation in Durham remained problematic. The university was only able to guarantee on campus housing to freshman and incoming transfer students for their first year. To manage the rest of the students the university ran a lottery for the remaining housing slots. As part of the university's "diversity" initiatives, woke administrators proposed exempting people of color and LGBT people from the lottery guaranteeing them housing. As might be expected, students objected to this blatant example of housing administration. The diversity administrator, the person to whom students would have to report discrimination concerns and who would investigate personally wrote letters to the student newspaper defending the lottery exemption and accusing the students who were objecting of exerting white male privilege based on their race and ethnicity. At this time the university was 60% female: 40% male and mostly white. The only demographic group vastly over-represented on campus were white women like this white lesbian administrator. Despite the unwritten rule of university administrators NOT attacking individual students for daring to express their opinions in the student newspaper, this lesbian had no problem doing so in the name of her woke feminist values. She trivialized the students concerns, denied there was a problem, justified the discriminatory policy and was clearly using her position to intimidate the students into silence. It didn't work. The students stuck to their guns with support from people like myself. In the end, the university's own attorney authored a letter to the newspaper essentially stating that the university needed to stick to its original race/gender neutral approach to the housing lottery based on the very equal protection laws related to housing that the students were referencing if it wished to avoid legal complications. A male administrator who had made such a fool of himself to justify discrimination against women would have been fired faster than the speed of light. The woman in this case was neither fired nor even disciplined and remained in her important role until she chose to retire.
So yes...men do indeed face prejudice and feminism is at the core of it!
Women didn't care about men's troubles until it started to affect their marriage prospects.
They still don't.
I would say the majority of women who discuss male troubles are concern trolling.