A fact is not offensive, but can be used offensively in an offensive argument. By some school of logic - so I learned recently but forgot what school that was -

A fact is not offensive, but can be used offensively in an offensive argument. By some school of logic - so I learned recently but forgot what school that was - an argument consists at least of premises and conclusion. If the premises is underspecified, the conclusion can be wrong even if the premises is factual. That is, the correlation suggested by the data might not lead to the conclusion when more data is considered. The fallacy here might be post hoc ergo propter hoc (a term I also learned only recently). He was basically arguing outside of his field of expertise. I'm not inclined toward gender studies either, but if addressing their conclusions, that women are confronted with unintentional bias, then that argument needs to be taken up. The career argument is the premises, not the conclusion. Edit: If there is a bias, that would necessarily show up in statistics. Even if the initial data point doesn't show that bias. If there are two data points, one showing bias, one not, that's simply not enough to draw a conclusion either way. A physicist should know that. Anecdotal evidence of course does not count as additional data point.