Nonetheless, I find females to be useful when talking about women *and* girls.

I’ve actually come to view feminist demands that adult females be referred to always and only as “women” as a demeaning ploy for dominance. When one person must be more formal when speaking to or about another person than that other person is in return, that typically indicates subservience and inferiority. Adults address children by given name, while children are usually expected to reply with titles. Soldiers say “sir” to superiors, not subordinates. And so on.

So when a woman won’t accept any term for herself other than “woman” but feels free to call me a “guy” or a “dude,” she’s demanding respect that she doesn’t extend in return. This sort of fits in with Ginkgo’s subsequent post about gender and class, now that I think about it.

It was extremely frustrating. So I wasn’t surprised when the young woman who finally stood up and started challenging the panel snapped. First, despite her having her hand raised for most of the discussion, the panel never even acknowledged her or invited her opinion (despite soliciting the opinion of several guys both on and off the panel. Finally, she just stood up and started shouting to make her voice heard. Her question focused on the language the panel had been using – “female” instead of “woman,” and pointed out that it made us sound like livestock rather than people

It’s all fun with numbers. I recognize the utility of statistics as a way to analyze a situation, but mostly I see them used to obscure it.

Suppose one knows the number of Protestants and the suicide rate in the USA, but one does not have data linking religion and suicide at the individual level. If one is interested in the suicide rate of Protestants, it is a mistake to estimate it by the total suicide rate divided by the number of Protestants.

In Cicero’s example, they’re trying to link women to total DV victims even though they don’t have data linking women to DV on the individual level. In gwallan’s Australian example, they’re trying to link men to DV abusers, but they maliciously removed data linking men to abusers at the individual level. So they’re dividing the total number of incidents in the entire population by just the number of men or just the number of women in order to inflate the numbers for that particular group.

“a name for conflating the numbers for men and women and presenting them as numbers only for women”

I’m uncertain of any specific label for the type of misrepresentation asked about. Possibly “conflation”.

A similar, albeit reversed, Australian example would be the interference by federal Labor politicians in the creation of our Bureau of Statistic’s first “Personal Safety Survey” in the mid nineties. They forced the removal of any questions which might reveal the sex of an individual who had abused any study participant. The study will have identified abuse actually committed by women as having been committed by men.