Via Slate:
Tami Reiss has a New Year’s resolution, and Gmail will help her keep it. With her company’s new Chrome browser extension, Reiss has put a bullseye on the tempering words and phrases—just, I think, sorry—that clutter up her emails, undermine her authority, and dilute her leadership capacity. Before midnight on New Year’s Eve, Reiss wants to get 10,000 other women to pledge to ban these words from their emails, too.
The Just Not Sorry extension, which is downloadable at the Chrome app store, underlines self-demeaning phrases like “I’m no expert” and qualifying words like “actually” in red in Gmail like they’re spelling errors. Hover your mouse over the red words, and you’ll see explanatory quotes from women like Tara Mohr (“‘Just’ demeans what you have to say. ‘Just’ shrinks your power.”) and Sylvia Ann Hewlett (“Using sorry frequently undermines your gravitas and makes you appear unfit for leadership.”). Reiss and her team also drew inspiration from business writer Lydia Dishman and a comic by artist Yao Xiao on why “thank you” is more effective than “sorry.”
“I am queen of the ‘does this makes sense?’” Reiss told me in a phone call, referencing one of the phrases the app targets. As the CEO of Cyrus Innovation, a software development consulting firm that specializes in women-led companies and tech teams (“no mansplaining” is one of the firm’s top two rules), Reiss has seen too many women inadvertently discredit their own opinions in pitches. “When someone uses one of these qualifiers, it minimizes others confidence in their ideas,” she wrote on Medium. “Whether you’re persuading an investor to provide funding, announcing a change in direction to your colleagues, or promoting your services to a client, you are building their confidence in you.”
