[SkyBelow]

>Saying the words "women are more likely than men to do X" leaves the reader unfortunately with the impression "many women do X," whereas that might not be true.

I wonder if this is related to "X is better than Y." leading to "How dare you say X isn't bad!" I didn't, X can be extremely horrible, it can be the second most horrible thing to exist. The only qualifier I gave was that Y was at least one rank more horrible than X. If instead I had used "Y is worse than X" this likely wouldn't have happened.

I'm wondering if many people, when reading a relative comparison, imagine it in some absolute setting and then assume that was the intended information to convey. If your case they imagine a case where more women than men do X, meaning they imagine a whole lot of women doing X and very few men doing X, even though it could actually have been 2 of every million women vs 1 of every million men.