What your boss makes of your apology

Mint

10-06-2025

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CANADIANS LOVE to say they're sorry (or 'sore"-y). One oft-quoted poll found that 90% of Canadians aged 18-25 would immediately apologise if a stranger bumped into them. Britons (who love a 'sorry, mate!") use the word at four times the rate Americans do. Remorseful Chinese say 'dway-boo-chee" (对不起), although such feelings are often left unspoken. A study of workers in China, Japan and Malaysia found that the Chinese were the most likely to admit guilt—but the least likely to actually apologise. Across all cultures, women are often thought to apologise more than men. Career experts think this can hold women back—they say it comes across as unserious or even incompetent. Lily Liu and Marshall Mo, both economists at Stanford, set out to quantify the gender gap, and study its implications.
The researchers split 700 people (all Americans) into 'workers" and 'employers". The workers answered multiple-choice questions from a standardised test; the employers evaluated their performances and decided who would be 'promoted". The workers were also asked to write a series of messages to their employer to try and sway the outcome.
Although men and women performed equally well on the test—they scored 4.16 and 4.24 out of ten, respectively—women were twice as likely to include the words 'sorry" or 'apologise" in their messages. When asked to rate how apologetic they actually were, from 0 to 100, women who had failed the test averaged 69 while men who had failed averaged 61.
Part of this apology gap had to do with confidence: the men thought they answered four of the ten questions correctly, on average, compared with 3.2 out of ten for the women. But even after controlling for confidence women apologised 12% more often.
How did this affect their chance of a promotion? The employers inferred lower ability from the workers who offered apologies. And—despite knowing that women generally apologise more—the employers judged women more harshly than their male counterparts. However, bosses also reported 'feeling warmer" towards them. These offsetting effects meant that the more apologetic workers were promoted just as often as other employees.
Such experiments do not always translate to the real world. But the lesson seems to be that workers need not avoid warm, apologetic phrases in their correspondences, if all they are angling for is a promotion. When it comes to furthering your career, at least in a Stanford lab, it doesn't hurt to say 'I'm sorry".