Why?! Why do women feel so compelled to apologize for EVERYTHING?
Maja Jovanovic wrote something that really stuck with me. Talking about a conference she went to she said, “During the 25 panels at that week-long conference, not once did I hear a man take the microphone and discount his accomplishments or minimize his experience. Yet every single time a woman took the microphone, an apologetic tone was sure to follow.”
She also relates-“My research assistant said ‘Sorry’ to the pizza delivery guy for being late to her house. She said, ‘Oh, my gosh, we live in a new subdevelopment. I’m so sorry. Did you have trouble finding the place?’
It’s one thing to simply be polite, and another to feel so submissive to other people that the first thing you think to say is, ‘I’m sorry.’
I think that even in these ‘enlightened times’ little girls are taught to be responsible to a fault by how they react to other people. I’ll go out on a limb to say that little boys are free to be loud and boisterous, whereas girls are discouraged from being too loud and ‘crazy.’ Having worked at an elementary school for many years, I’ve observed this time and again at recess, which is a microcosm of childhood behavior.
Fast forward to adult womanhood. Anecdotally, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve given another woman a compliment only to have her demur and proceed to give me an excuse as to why she really doesn’t measure up to the compliment.
A study from the University of Waterloo in Canada discovered that women do, in fact, apologize more than men. The finding was that women have a lower threshold for what they consider offensive than men do.
Needless apologizing undermines a woman’s ability to appear confident. Of course, it’s polite to apologize for something you did that shouldn’t have happened, but just apologize and move on. Don’t apologize for EVERYTHING!