We often presume that women apologize more than men do. In this spirit John Wayne once advised the men of his generation: “Never apologize. It's a sign of weakness.” Comedian Jim Belushi offered similar advice in 2006, titling his book on relationships Real Men Don't Apologize. Beyond these macho clichés, what role does gender play in the sorts of apologetic meanings I outline here? Does gender correlate to one's tendency to apologize? Do women and men emphasize different aspects of apologies or exhibit tendencies to apologize for different classes of harms? Or are these practices so entwined with culturally specific gender dynamics that speaking in generalizations would only reinforce patriarchal stereotypes and biases? Social scientists are better equipped to answer this question than I am, but my approach may offer some insight into how other disciplines theorize questions of apologies and gender.

Before going further, I want to emphasize an obvious point. In order to determine whether women apologize more than men do, we need to answer two questions. First, what do we mean by “apologize”? As I have shown, this takes some work. Do we refer only to categorical apologies? Expressions of sympathy? The utterance of the word “sorry”? Once we stipulate this, we would need to conduct methodologically compelling studies designed to answer such empirical questions. Notice that this applies to all questions of this sort: Who apologizes more, liberals or conservatives? Theists or atheists? The rich or the poor? Children or the elderly? Japanese or U.S. citizens?