Is apologising gendered?
“It takes years as a woman to unlearn what you have been taught to be sorry for. It takes years to find your voice and seize your real estate.”
Occasionally the idea for a blog doesn't so much suggest itself as smack me in the face and insist that I write it. This is one such occasion.
This was prompted by three separate incidents in fairly short order. I was on the receiving end of suboptimal behaviour from three different people, and on none of these occasions did the person apologise. I say “people” when what I actually mean is “men”, and it gave me pause to wonder whether the propensity to apologise, or not, is gendered. I had a suspicion that it was, and this prompted me to look into it further.
Exhibit one
My accountant left sending me the information for my VAT return so late that I ended up reviewing and signing everything while on holiday, the day before it was due. He had recently taken over my accounts as my last accountant had left the firm. I sent him a polite email afterwards, asking for at least a week's notice next time. He replied, “not a problem”, and moved on. Not a problem? It was a problem! I'd just told him so, and still no apology came.
Exhibit two
A “misunderstanding” over fees with a clerk to a barrister I'd instructed for a tribunal hearing. Counsel ended up unable to review documents in advance as originally planned, so her input was limited to an hour on the phone with me to talk them through. The job had shrunk from something substantial to something small, but the clerk insisted the original fee, many multiples of what I now expected, remained in place. I explained the change more than once, expecting him to go back to the barrister and adjust it. Instead he dug his heels in, before eventually capitulating with, “I think the original fee was purely down to a misunderstanding.” No apology, despite my having made our position clear from the start, at a time I could least afford to keep repeating myself (I was snowed under trying to get my work finished before my holiday).
Exhibit three
Also in the run-up to a holiday, I'd carved out time to speak to a contact about becoming self-employed, rejigging my calendar and missing a much-needed gym session to fit him in. He'd assured me the date was in his diary. The time came and went, with no answer on his phone, until a text arrived an hour later: “Hi Rachel, just got off client calls, so probs a squeeze for your 3pm. Could try again Friday or tomorrow. No worries though, as I'm expecting a couple of offers to consider.”
I was gobsmacked. He'd told me explicitly the date was in his diary, at a time when I was juggling childcare on top of two jobs and my own self-care had gone off a cliff, as it often does over summer. No apology for what looked very much like forgetting we were due to speak. WTAF!
Three men, in fairly close succession, messed me around, and on every occasion, when I raised it, politely and without aggression, no apology followed. If I had done any one of these things, I would have been mortified, both personally and professionally. I don't like inconveniencing people, and I'd have fallen over myself to apologise, heinous people pleaser that I am. I apologise too much, and I'm trying to train my daughter not to say sorry when there's nothing to be sorry for, like the reflex to apologise when someone else bumps into her.
I've written before, in Do You Email Like a Boss?, calling on women specifically not to apologise unnecessarily at work, “sorry to bother you” when they are doing nothing of the sort. I think women have a particular habit of saying sorry for things that don't need an apology at all. So this made me wonder properly, for the first time: is apologising gendered? Do women apologise more than men? And does society expect us to?
Why women say sorry more often
The most cited study on this is by Karina Schumann and Michael Ross, published in Psychological Science in 2010. They had participants keep a diary of every offence they committed or experienced, and whether an apology followed. Women reported giving more apologies than men, but they also reported committing more offences. When Schumann and Ross looked at the proportion of offences that actually led to an apology, once committed, there was no difference between men and women at all.
Applied to my three men, none of them showed unusual stubbornness or an especially thick skin. What was missing in every case was any sign that an apology had crossed their mind at all. Schumann called this the threshold hypothesis, and it's been replicated a number of times since: women simply register more of their own behaviour, and other people's, as offensive in the first place. Men have a higher bar for what counts as worth saying sorry for.
There's a cost to being the one who doesn't soften things
Here is where we really get to the heart of the matter. A meta-analysis of 71 studies, by researchers at Emory and Stanford, found that women are consistently punished for showing assertiveness or dominance in ways men simply are not. It didn't affect how competent people thought they were; it affected how much people liked them. A separate, larger study found that when women behaved just as forcefully as their male colleagues in a workplace disagreement, their perceived worth dropped by more than $15,000 a year, over double the drop recorded for men behaving identically.
You can see how this adds up. Women who push back too hard risk being seen as difficult, and men who don't bother to apologise mostly get away with it. Makes you wonder how much of the gender “sorry” gap is really about personality, and how much of it is just self-preservation.
None of this excuses my accountant, or the clerk, or the man who forgot our call and framed it as me being lucky he might squeeze me in later. But it does explain something. I don't think women are more naturally sorry than men. I think we've been trained, by what gets punished and what gets ignored, to notice more, absorb more, and smooth over more, whilst men usually have the luxury of continuing in blissful ignorance.
I'm still working on it with my 11 year old daughter. I'd like to think I'm getting better at it myself too. Next time you catch yourself typing “sorry to bother you” for something that isn't bothering anyone, try deleting it and see how the email reads without it. It usually reads better.
It feels fitting to end with the clip of Nirvana performing “All Apologies” on MTV Unplugged:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWmkuH1k7uA
Kurt Cobain clearly bucking the trend of men who don't feel the need to apologise. #NotAllMen.
Enjoy the rest of your week.
Rachel