Lena Dunham said women apologize too much.
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In an essay she penned for LinkedIn, the 30-year-old director said she and other women utter the words “I’m sorry” more often than men do. (RELATED: Lena Dunham: I’d ‘Kill Myself’ If I Was A Man)
“Apologizing is a modern plague and I’d be willing to bet (though I have zero scientific research to back this up) that many women utter ‘I’m sorry’ more on a given day than ‘Thank You’ and ‘You’re Welcome’ combined,” Dunham wrote. “So many of the women I know apologize like it’s a job they were given by the government (we’ll save the whys of that for a massive sociology text).”
“We rush to say it when we’re interrupted. We scream it across a crowded restaurant when someone else arrives late so we’ve lost our table. We mutter it when a man walks too close to us on the street.” (RELATED:Lena Dunham: ‘White Men’ Can’t Understand What It’s Like To Be ‘Under Attack’)
(Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The New Yorker)
“I am a woman who is sometimes right, sometimes wrong but somehow always sorry. And this has never been more clear to me than in the six years since I became a boss.”
“I had men more than twice my age for whom I was the final word on the set of ‘Girls,’ and I had to express my needs and desires clearly to a slew of lawyers, agents and writers. And while my commitment to my work overrode almost any performance anxiety I had, it didn’t override my hardwired instinct to apologize.”
“If I changed my mind, if someone disagreed with me, even if someone else misheard me or made a mistake… I was so, so sorry.”
Dunham said she has now vowed to replace apologies “with more fully formed and honest sentiments.”