It really depends on why someone is saying it. If one is saying it as an observation of statistics, then it's fine (usually. There are contexts where it is not; it's not a set of facts you should point out to a group of students about to take a college entrance exam, for instance). If you're saying it in the context of a causal inference, such as, for example, the Damore memo, then it's falling into the trap of conflating correlation and causation that has traditionally unfairly banned women (and men) from entire allowed modes of participation in society.
> Yes, at one point in time oppression from one sex against another was real in intellectual pursuits, be it academia or certain areas of interest. And there are instances of it today. But it’s not as pervasive as so many commentators or inclusion boards want it to be.
I agree. Many commentators want it to be far less pervasive than it is. Unfortunately, it's still very pervasive. We are no more than two generations removed (in the US at least) from women being generally overtly barred from working in most industries. We are only a scant 100 years out from women in the US being allowed the right to vote. It hasn't been enough time for the difference of fact to permeate into a difference in opinion; old prejudices die hard.
For example, the rest of your comment indicates you believe that the differences we see in society are biologically rooted. That's precisely the question the jury is out on; we used to believe it was true, but psychology has come to understand much better how profoundly deep cultural indoctrination and phobia of new cultural patterns run. Before we make claims like "Men and women on average have widely different personalities, based purely on biological sex," we need to be extremely sure we isolate out cultural effects, which is damnably hard to do.
Your example of knitting, specifically, ahistorically excludes the Celtic culture [https://www.thefencepost.com/news/when-men-knitted-a-surpris...]. Any discussion of biological imperative to knit needs to explain why men knit in Celtic societies, not only why men don't knit as much in Western societies now (and given that we know how quickly genetics change, it's going to be a real chore coming up with a genetic explanation that distinguishes Celts from the rest of humanity).