So fucking fed up with the sexism in my field

EDIT: RIP MY INBOX! Clarification at the bottom.

You often read posts by women lamenting their experiences of sexism in the workplace, be it missed advancement opportunities or the constant feeling of being scrutinized, of having to do better than is expected of their male peers to qualify. And then you get guys doubting that it's true and it pisses me off because I know exactly what it's like.

I'm a young male psychologist. Almost all my collegues both in this workplace and my previous two, and in the field in general, are women, most of them middle aged. I've never had a male boss.

And it is SO clear that anything to do with emotions or relationships or healthcare has become (or maybe always was?) a female-dominated field.

Up until very recently I was the lowest-paid psychologist in our office. Less qualified women with less experience and fewer years of employment in the field were being paid higher than me.

I constantly have to defend my methods and my choices. It is totally normal that patients sometimes want to switch therapists, hey, I even encourage it. Whatever's best for them. I have patients switch away from me at roughly the same rate as my coworkers. But for some reason, I'm the only person that gets called up to the boss to explain myself when this happens. Even though one of my coworkers (kudos to her for standing up for me!) explained to our boss (who has no mental health background) that patients switching is totally normal, I STILL get it thrown in my face in every yearly performance review.

It is never accepted as fact that I know how to do my job, I constantly have to prove myself. My female coworkers can work half as hard and receive twice the recognition, even the new hires it is just assumed from day one that they know what they are doing.

And idea presented at a meeting is scrutinized from every angle when I say it, accepted at face value when a woman says it.

If we are having a therapists' conference to discuss clients we need help with, and I give a response, the other therapists just keep asking the group until one of the women agrees with what I said or gives the same advice worded differently.

But fuck all of them, I will be free soon. If everything works out I will be going to a trade school this fall, this field I'm in just isn't worth it. After that I can just show up as an HVAC tech at any customer's house and nobody will ever question my competence based solely on my sex ever again.

Clarifications

First up, thanks for all the support guys, you've been great. I should add that I wrote this earlier in the day when I had just had a major "fuck this" moment after a female customer (rep of a large employer that pays for their staff to see us, sort of how workplace insurance works in the US) had called specifically to question my credentials and competence, based on one single patient having complained, something I can guarantee never has happened to any of my female coworkers, and never will. And I had to sit there and politely swallow her baseless criticism and smooth things over for the sake of customer relations. Never experienced anything like that and I hope I never will again either. I'll respond to some of the common answers ideas here:

• Open my own practice: as it were, this is a historically bad time for that. My country has universal healthcare, and many new corporate actors have entered that market so that large companies with hundreds of therapists can now make contracts with the government and accept patients who pay nothing out of pocket. Private practices cannot get such contracts for legal reasons I won't bore you with here. The number of private practices is declining as they go out of business since hell, why pay when you can get it for free just by waiting a month or three? I'm simplyfying here but that's the gist of it.

• To those saying "change jobs": I have, this pattern has been consisten in all three clinics I've worked in. Three is not a huge number, but I'd rather not wager my wellbeing on it just being poor luck so far.

• To those saying my coworkers are not (only) sexist, but it is a question of workplace bullying or gaslighting: I really don't think so. For all their faults and how they treat me, they are ordinary, normal and actually mostly nice people. This is not some conspiracy against me. They are just blind to their biases and don't realize how shitty their behavior is. I also know from experience that when you call women out on their sexist bullshit, they react just about as well as men who are called out on their sexist bullshit, which is to say, generally not well at all.

• Is the whole HVAC thing a joke? No, it honestly isn't. I've been considering changing careers for several years, and the things mentioned in this post are only part of the reason. And I do still believe I have a valuable contribution to make to the clinical field, and I do like working with patients, and my hope is to somehow do both therapy and HVAC part time, I'll figure something out. I like working with my hands and solving technical problems, I'll be fine. And even though it will certainly be a loss in financial terms, it appears that psychologists and HVAC techs are closer to each other here than they are in the USA.