Women apologize too much. So, anyway, goes the stereotype, promulgated everywhere from business-coaching seminars to shampoo commercials. The habit of constant "sorry," supposedly rooted in female self-denigration and self-doubt, has been widely decried by those looking to uplift women in the workplace. In January 2016, Tami Reiss actually created a Chrome app, Just Not Sorry, to remove the word and other "shrinking phrases" from women's emails.

It's not that the stereotype is baseless. Research confirms that women do, in fact, apologize more often than men. But there's reason to be suspicious of the tendency to blame it all on women, or their low self-confidence. For one thing: If someone has low self-confidence, you probably can't help by telling her that the way she speaks is problematic. For another: The research points to the idea that the disparity arises not from the fact that women are socialized to apologize "too often," but from the fact that men are not socialized to apologize at all.

Here's what happens when someone has to make a public apology after having spent his entire life being trained to believe that he does not need to apologize for anything: He really, really sucks at it. As a case study, let's analyze one of this week's most notorious male apologies.

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chyron operator, Tuesday 9 AM: I've had some bad days in this job but I've never had to write "(Hitler Gassed Millions)" on screen



2:20 PM: pic.twitter.com/hE4gP5vzlT — Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) April 11, 2017

Okay. So, while giving a press conference on Tuesday, Sean Spicer noted "someone as despicable as Hitler…didn't even sink to using chemical weapons." Hitler, as the heroic chyron writer above reminds us, gassed millions of Jews during the Holocaust. Now, as mistakes go, "publicly forgetting about the Holocaust during Passover" is pretty bad! It is, I think we can fairly say, a mistake that objectively deserves an apology. Here is how Sean Spicer responded when someone pointed out his mistake at the press conference:

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The transcript, for those who can't roll video:

He was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Ashad [sic] is doing. I mean, there was clearly.... I understand your point. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. There was not, in the, he brought them into the Holocaust centers, I understand that. But I'm saying, in the way that Assad used them where he went into towns, dropped them down to innocent, into the middle of town, it was brought.

This is a classic example of critical apology failure. Instead of considering that someone is pointing out his error because he made a mistake, Spicer blithely assumes that what he has done is perfectly fine, and that the person questioning him is simply too stupid to realize this. ("Thank you," he says several times, unaware that the situation calls for an entirely different two-word social pleasantry.) Because Spicer assumes he is in the right, he then launches into a lengthier explanation, which contains several more mistakes, and gets him into deeper trouble, by a) implying that he does not think German Jews were real Germans, and b) forcing everyone to realize that "Holocaust centers" is what "concentration camps" would have been called if Hitler had wanted them to sound like luxury spas.

Because Spicer made those mistakes, he now has to attempt the apology again:

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NEW: a second clarification from the @presssec on Assad/Hitler comparison: pic.twitter.com/IU8OA5jFAb — Hallie Jackson (@HallieJackson) April 11, 2017

But this sounds like he's saying that Holocaust victims were not "innocent people." So, because Sean Spicer is still substituting explanations for apologies, he has to rewrite his previous explanation and post it again:

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WH just sent out an updated clarification from Spicer, changing “innocent people” to “population centers” at the end.



via @HallieJackson pic.twitter.com/A3k9W75ztt — Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) April 11, 2017

And because people are now calling him out for defending his own words rather than focusing on the Holocaust, he has to do it again, this time adding a sentence saying that he thinks the Holocaust was bad:

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From the print pool, what appears to be a 4th Hitler clarification from Spicer, which adds a sentence at the end not there previously pic.twitter.com/lxZDJb2rwt — Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) April 11, 2017

But at this point, the issue is not even whether Sean Spicer thinks the Holocaust was bad. The issue now is that Sean Spicer has spent hours of his life flagrantly not apologizing for something he has clearly gotten wrong. Finally, after four separate failed attempts to amend the situation without admitting that he made a mistake, Sean Spicer got around to saying "I'm sorry." He cannot stop saying "I'm sorry." Sean Spicer has apologized to the public, to the president, to his dog, to my cat, to your own mother. But it doesn't matter. At this point, the public reaction to Sean Spicer will be about how terrible he is at saying the words "I'm sorry," not the fact that he eventually got around to saying them.

Sean Spicer has spent hours of his life flagrantly not apologizing for something he has clearly gotten wrong.

This week's other prominent example of the Manpology Epidemic comes from yet another extremely bad public mistake. In fact, if anything, this one is more horrific: After 69-year-old Dr. David Dao refused to "voluntarily" give up his seat on an overbooked United Airlines flight, law enforcement was dispatched to his seat, and Dao was physically assaulted and dragged from the plane. The incident was captured in graphic and disturbing videos by several passengers.

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Here was the initial apology by United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz:

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United CEO response to United Express Flight 3411. pic.twitter.com/rF5gNIvVd0 — United Airlines (@united) April 10, 2017

Herein, alas, we witness two more common—yet lethal—apology defects. First, there is the false-target maneuver, wherein the offending party "apologizes," but not for the thing they did wrong. Having failed to grasp their original wrongness, but aware that an apology has been requested, they begin casting about for the apology they feel most comfortable giving. Munoz, for example, "apologizes" for having to "re-accommodate customers." No one is upset about re-accommodating customers! The headlines, with accompanying photos of a 69-year-old man bleeding through his mouth, do not read "Shocking Video of United Airlines Re-Accommodating Customer!" People want United Airlines to apologize for physically brutalizing a human man; this apology avoids the topic altogether and hopes that because the word "apology" is in there, no one will notice.

Second—but no less grating—there is the unearned appeal to empathy, wherein two parties who are not equally wounded are presumed to be in equal amounts of pain. The assault on Dao, Munoz assures us, "was an upsetting event to all of us here at United." That may be true. But there's "my company was criticized for its customer service" upsetting, and there's "I was knocked out and dragged through an airplane aisle" upsetting, and one of those is way more upsetting than the other. This maneuver places them on a level playing field, and thereby denies the severity of the original offense. Really, says the appeal to empathy, you should be apologizing to me, if you think about it. This never, ever works. It has made things worse every time it has been attempted. It is the sort of thing you would only do if you really, truly sucked at apologizing.

There's "my company was criticized for its customer service" upsetting, and there's "I was knocked out and dragged through an airplane aisle" upsetting, and one of those is way more upsetting than the other.

Predictably, United Airlines has had to issue several more apologies after screwing up the first one. And, predictably, none of them have been well received, because the bad impression put forth by the first apology was too powerful. In all the tsk-tsking we do about women's over-apologizing, it's worth noting that both these situations would have been resolved much more quickly and cleanly if the men involved had been able to deliver an immediate and sincere "I'm sorry."

Here is where the research on the gender apology gap comes in, and here's where it gets interesting. It's not just that men are socialized to apologize less—they're socialized not to believe the apologies are necessary. There are plenty of theories for why men don't apologize—maybe they're afraid to be vulnerable! Maybe they're asserting dominance!—but, according to the 2010 study that confirmed the presence of the apology gap, the answer is a lot simpler than that. After "[analyzing] the number of self-reported offenses and apologies made by 66 subjects over a 12-day period," scientists found that women apologized more, but also that "women report more offenses than men." It wasn't that women over-apologized, and it wasn't that men under-apologized; both genders gave apologies whenever they believed they had done something wrong. Men were less likely to believe they could be wrong.

Maybe, instead of telling women to alter their communication styles to sound more like men, we should spend more time training men in the dark arts of women.

All of this—from Spicer substituting explanation for accountability, to Munoz treating himself like one of the wounded parties rather than the offender—can plausibly be explained by the theory that neither man is able to fully comprehend that he is in error. This is just how sexism works: When we privilege men's voices and perspectives over women's, men naturally develop an inflated idea of their own intelligence or skill. They're biking with training wheels and they think they're winning the Tour de France. But when challenges arise, men who have not been socialized to recognize their own failings are less able to absorb the fact that they've screwed up. They not only make mistakes, but they also make mistakes in correcting the mistakes they've made.

It's not that women's self-confidence doesn't need improvement. We probably do apologize too much, or at least, we apologize too often to people who don't reciprocate the courtesy. But at least women have been forced to develop some rudimentary self-awareness, including the awareness that they are not perfect. Without that, you're Sean Spicer, issuing his 579th statement of the day about why it was probably okay to call them "Holocaust centers." So maybe, instead of telling women to alter their communication styles to sound more like men, we should spend more time training men in the dark arts of women. For example, the ability to say, and believe, the three apparently unthinkable words "I was wrong."

Sady Doyle Sady Doyle is the author of 'Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear ...

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