A few years ago, a sketch on “Inside Amy Schumer” so aptly depicted a propensity for errant and extraneous apologies among women, it sparked an ongoing conversation that asked why and begged to change the narrative.

Not naming gender (but including a female anecdote), a male writer for Tonic asked whether the compulsion to apologize is less about remorse and more a sign of anxiety. Meanwhile, female writer Sloane Crosley penned an op-ed about women and their tendency to apologize for the New York Times that takes a totally different tone, saying “sorry” can also serve as “a poor translation for a string of expletives.”

“It’s a Trojan horse for genuine annoyance, a tactic left over from centuries of having to couch basic demands in palatable packages in order to get what we want,” writes Crosley. “All that exhausting maneuvering is the etiquette equivalent of a vestigial tail.”

Is the need to over-apologize really more a female thing? And regardless of who does it more, why are we doing it?

Maja Jovanovic, Ph.D., sociology professor at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada and author of “Hey Ladies, Stop Apologizing and Other Career Mistakes Women Make,” says women do, in fact, have a tendency to apologize more and do it for different reasons than men.

“We know intuitively that women apologize more than men, but now we actually have the research to back it up,” says Jovanovic, referring to a University of Waterloo, Canada study that found that women likely tend to apologize more often because they have a lower threshold than men for what they consider offensive. “If men deem an infraction egregious enough, they apologize. The problem is they find very few infractions deserving of an apology, and women are apologizing for just about everything,” she says. This seems to fall in line with Crosley’s line of thinking.

Like Crosley, Jovanovic attributes a woman’s tendency to apologize to being “socialized into a passive mindset” and “people pleasing behavior” from an early age. “Apologies have become our de-facto way of communicating, a way of filling the silence and keeping the peace when interacting with others,” she says.

She also attributes a fear (the driver of anxiety, mind you) of not being liked and being seen as offensive, to excessive apologies. “We preempt what we think people are thinking about us with an apology as if to say, ‘I already know what you’re thinking … and I’m sorry,’” she explains.