“This app prevented me from needlessly writing ‘I am sorry’ in six emails today alone,” writes a reviewer.
What's the app? It's a Gmail extension called Just Not Sorry and it's aimed at women who tend to undermine their own words with excessive deference.
A plug-in available only on Google Chrome, it highlights words in your email that it considers damaging or overly self-deprecating with a red dotted underline –as if you had misspelled the word. Of course, you can choose to ignore it.
Only a few words or phrases are currently on the list – just, actually, sorry, apologise (no, it does not yet recognise UK spelling), “I think”, “I’m no expert” and “does that make sense?”
If you hover over them, an explanation will appear as to why the plug-in considers this qualifier inadequate for the communication, using commentary from businesswomen, female entrepreneurs and coaches such as Sylvia Ann Hewlett.
“Using ‘sorry’ frequently undermines your gravitas and makes you appear unfit for leadership,” she says.
Why the need? Just Not Sorry’s creator, the Cyrus Innovation chief executive Tami Reiss, was at a women’s networking event in late 2015 where the women were talking about how they softened their language at work.
“As entrepreneurial women, we run businesses and lead teams,” Ms Reiss says, explaining the app’s purpose. “Why aren’t we writing with the confidence of the positions?”
So she came up with the idea to highlight trigger words as part of her company’s Female Founder initiative.
“Because our brains are trained to see [underlined words] as an error, you immediately go back to edit them,” she writes in a Medium post. “But they are spelt correctly! At which point, you realise it’s because the word is hurting the message.”
Of course this is a subject that has been widely explored – and even parodied in a Pantene commercial, where women corrected themselves when saying things like “Sorry, can I ask a stupid question?” to “I have a question.” My own deferential idiom? “I’m afraid that.” Please do just add it. Thank you.
q&a: it’s more than a resolution
Suzanne Locke explains more about the app:
How successful is Just Not Sorry?
So far it has been downloaded more than 15,000 times, meaning Ms Reiss’s 2016 resolution to get 10,000 women signed up to be “just not sorry” has been smashed in the first week of the year. Of course there’s been a lot of publicity to help …
Who are these women writing the comments for the ‘trigger’ words?
Good question. Bonnie Marcus, Lydia Dishman, Tara Mohr and Sylvia Hewlett, authors of the snippets providing context, are not exactly household names. Bonnie Marcus is a women's coach, Lydia Dishman a business journalist, Tara Mohr a coach and author of Playing Big and Sylvia Hewlett an economist who runs a non-profit organisation, the Centre for Talent Innovation.
So everyone’s a fan?
Well, no. Debbie Cameron, the author of blog Language: A Feminist Guide writes: "Nike didn't choose 'Just Do It' as a slogan because they thought it sounded pleasingly weak and powerless." And Vogue writes: "This app is far from the magical cure that will fix a working woman's tendency to undersell herself in emails."
Will more words be added?
The code is open-source, on Cyrus Innovations’ page on Github, so anyone can add to it – or spin off their own app.
Are there other Gmail extensions?
Wisestamp creates sophisticated signatures. Gmail Offline lets you carry on with emails when there’s no internet. Send Using Gmail makes sure mail:to links in web pages open an email window in Gmail. And SecureGmail allows you to lock sent emails with a password.
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