Abstract: This article examines patient and therapist causal explanations (evaluative judgments about why things go wrong) to see whether gender-related differences occur in patient and therapist explanations for patient-presenting problems and in therapist explanations for difficulties in the therapy relationship. At intake. causal explanations of female patients did not differ from those of male patients. Similarly, therapists did not provide significantly different explanations for problems of female and male patients. However, after 5-6 sessions, when therapists were asked to provide explanations for difficulties in the therapy relationship, regardless of the gender of the patient, female therapists tended to perceive themselves as responsible, while male therapists perceived patients as responsible (i.e. blamed them). In addition, in cross-gender pairings, women were perceived by therapists as responsible for the difficulties, whether she was the therapist reporting herself as responsible or the patient reported responsible by her male therapist. In either case, when a woman and a man were in a therapy relationship together, the causes of these difficulties in treatment, attributed to women, were perceived as longer-lasting and unlikely to change.

The text of this article summarizes literature showing that women tend to blame themselves when things go wrong, and that others tend to blame women as well, while men tend to blame others, and others observing men with difficulties tend to blame others as well. Similarly, depressed people tend to blame themselves, and others often blame depressed people for their problems as well. Could this finding play a part in the common observation that more women are depressed than men?

Obviously, individuals differences in processing information occur. Scientific findings are never intended to be used to label individuals; they are intended to help us investigate our own experience. The findings of strong patterns of information-processing biases in psychotherapist's judgments has implications for training of therapists and for helping women (and individuals from non-dominant cultural groups) in therapy protect themselves from experiences of being judged or blamed.