Do women apologize too much? According to several articles including one recently in The New York Times by Sloane Crosley (June 23, 2015), women say “I’m sorry” more than they need to and far more than men do. Excuse me for asking (whoops!), but why is that? One study reports that “men apologize less frequently than women because they have a higher threshold for what constitutes offensive behavior.” So men can be boorish where women are polite to the point of being overly apologetic. I agree that many of us apologize too often for reasons that don’t really matter. As in “I’m sorry to bother you.”
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