A familiar script keeps coming up in discussions about women at work – the repetition that women should stop saying sorry, take up space, and own their worth.
I’m sorry to say (you see, I’m doing the same), but it’s become truly boring. Most women already know this, or at least intellectually know it. So, why do women keep apologising? Because the advice, ‘to stop’, doesn’t work.
I see this in the coaching work I do with professional women and through my recruitment business. The truth is that many women are not apologising because they are weak. They apologise because they are socially intelligent.
What we should be asking instead is: why does apologetic language remain a survival skill for women in modern workplaces? Perhaps the redirect will shift from shallow confidence coaching into sociology, psychology, power and economics.
Yet, women still pay the price. More than 50 per cent of employers have a gender pay gap larger than 11.2 per cent in favour of men. Survival or not, apologetic language keeps women underpaid. Here’s how:
Symbolic empowerment
Despite decades of empowerment messaging, many modern corporate cultures reward symbolic empowerment while still socially punishing women who communicate with unapologetic authority. Women are twice as likely as men to be called ‘bossy’ at work, even when both genders exhibit similar behaviours.
And so, a woman can lead a meeting, solve a crisis, manage a client, fix a broken process, and still finish her sentence with, “sorry, just one more thing”.
This behaviour rarely has anything to do with competence or confidence. Quite the opposite. It’s reading the room.
Damned if you do
Assertive women often receive harsher social evaluations than assertive men. Social psychologists have long described this tension as a ‘double bind’.
Women are often expected to be warm, collaborative and emotionally intelligent, while leadership itself is still unconsciously associated with decisiveness, authority and assertiveness. The result can be a difficult balancing act: likeable women may be overlooked for leadership, while highly assertive women may be perceived negatively for displaying the same behaviours praised in men.
A well-known leadership study showed that people saw a successful venture capitalist as equally competent whether the name was Howard or Heidi. However, Heidi was regularly seen as less likeable. It’s referred to as the assertive women’s penalty, and we wonder why apologies and softer language remain part of our arsenal.
Roxanne Calder shares more career advice in her book Earning Power: Breaking Barriers and Building Wealth for Women.
Contradictory advice
The contradiction creates linguistic hesitation. Consequently, we see this strange balancing act between competence and likeability.
The social lubricant, softening capability to make it digestible: pleasant enough not to threaten; warm enough not to alienate and collaborative enough not to be labelled difficult. And ambitious, just not too much.
We have learned that the delicate dance gets us in. It’s a way to mellow interruption, urgency, authority, ambition and sometimes even intelligence. The problem is how quickly workplaces translate softened language as a sign of discounted authority.
Financial ramifications
Workplaces, like everywhere else, are listening psychologically, not just verbally. Saying sorry a couple of times won’t lead to a loss of promotion. Yet, when capability is repeatedly wrapped in apology, hesitation or over-explanation, the interpretation impacts status, authority and value. This all comes with financial consequences.
At first, the financial erosion is invisible, then it accumulates. It plays out as ineffectual negotiation, reduced visibility, discounted authority, missed opportunities and assumptions about confidence, readiness, judgement and influence. This is where language stops being merely choreography and begins affecting a woman’s earning power significantly.
The consequence is that women become dependable rather than promotable. And that’s a hard turnaround for a reputation.
The irony is that many apologetic women are often the highest performers in the room. They’re the most prepared, the most emotionally aware, and the most reliable. But over time, constantly softening competence can create a dangerous disconnect between capability and perceived authority.
And workplaces, despite everything they say about inclusion and empowerment, still reward perceived authority economically. That is the real cost of saying ‘sorry’.
