I heard a new one today: "We know gender inequality exists because 78% of Syrian refugees are women or children". This is so silly I wouldn't normally comment on it, but it was posited to a live audience of several hundred people so it's worth a quick debunking.
First of all, according to CIA World Factbook the median age in Syria is 21, which means half of Syrians are older than 21 and half are younger. 21 is obviously very nearly 18, so we'll say that roughly half of Syrians are children. Given that adults are split more-or-less evenly between males and females, we would expect ~75% of refugees to be women or children if there were no discrimination. Clearly, we're well within the margin of error.
Secondly, even if 99% of refugees were women and children, why would we conclude that Syrian men have it better? Presumably, they're either killed or in graver danger. This is a textbook example of survivorship bias.
If social justice is to remain in vogue, it needs to stop invoking arguments that can't stand against common sense1. The movement is blowing its credibility for (at best) marginal progress.
No this one example doesn't prove a trend, but there are dozens and dozens of examples of prima facie statistics put forth by popular social justice institutions and otherwise credible personalities, which are beyond the intended scope of this post.