> but it leads the reader to a potential false implication that an average man is better than an average woman.
I think that's _you_ turning the statement into something much broader than intended. The claim is about engineers and you're jumping from "men are better than women in engineering" to "men are better overall."
To give a related example, "Most good NBA players are black." I don't think anyone would bother trying to couch this in a bunch of "well, for all we know that's just a function of more NBA players being black than white" arguments, nor would anyone be lead to think "the average black man is better than the average white man" as a result of that statement. I _do_ agree however that there are some people who see rather narrowly-defined statements and turn them into something they're not...
>I think that's _you_ turning the statement into something much broader than intended.
My point is that it is possible for a reader to turn it that way, for a variety of reasons (lack of understanding of statistics, preexisting biases, or whatever). And that getting a reader to mistakenly generalize is the purpose of a misleading statement.
To mislead is to direct into a falsehood by implication even though the literally expressed facts are all true; the writer's bad intentions are necessary to qualify something as misleading I'd say, for the same reason that not all false statements are lies because to be a lie the speaker must know the statement is false and still use it. There are probably much better examples than the one I came up with on the fly, though.
Context is everything. If the wider discussion was about how men are better than women, and in that context it was shown that "Most good engineers are male", it would be natural to draw the wrong conclusion.
At least Gemini 3.5 is fair about it:
And not particularly racially sensitive It explained it is more confident when assessing the small, highly quantifiable population of sports professionals vs a very large, diverse population of "engineers".