A few years back I noticed something: the frequency with which the word “just” appeared in email and conversation from female co-workers and friends. I first sensed this it shortly after leaving Google and joining a company with a high ratio of female to male employees.
Google, and everywhere else I’d worked before, had a more traditional gender mix. I’d never really noted a high concentration of “just” before, so I thought it might be my imagination. But soon I knew my hunch was legit. “Just” just kept showing up way too frequently.
“I just wanted to check in on…”
“Just wondering if you’d decided between….”
“If you can just give me an answer, then…”
“I’m just following up on…”
I started paying attention, at work and beyond. It didn’t take long to sense something I hadn’t noticed before: women used “just” a lot more often than men.
Still, it was only a hunch — I had no data. Yet even if it was selective listening, it seemed I was hearing “just” three to four times more frequently from women than from men.
It hit me that there was something about the word I didn’t like. It was a “permission” word, in a way — a warm-up to a request, an apology for interrupting, a shy knock on a door before asking “Can I get something I need from you?”