My Monday column suggested Canadians should look in the mirror for woman-hating culture instead of singling out the tiny fraction of Muslim women who personally choose to wear a veil as exemplifying the problem.

The response was fascinating, evidence of a perceptual abyss between men and women over the matter of sexual assault.

Mail from men was dominated by outrage that I should sully Canada’s reputation, demanding comparative statistics from other countries — Canada ranks 19th on the World Economic Forum’s gender equity index — and citing places where the problem is worse. Take India, for example, although do note that Indian men protest “rape culture” in the streets.

In Canada, we bluster from privileged positions about how good women have it.

Mail from women generally expressed appreciation that a man would say something about what they perceive to be a threatening, anti-woman cultural bias to which many men seem blind or, perhaps more worrying, prefer not to address. Men think there’s no problem, several observed, because for those enjoying male privilege, there isn’t one.

Some men thought Canada must do more to address the problem of woman-hating violence and its amplification in misogynistic rhetoric, which is often discounted uncouth student behaviour rather than considered evidence of culturally-embedded attitudes that should be deeply troubling.

And some women denounced me as an un-Canadian, anti-Conservative wuss who doesn’t understand the sinister threat that Muslim women choosing the veil pose to our way of life.

I don’t hate the prime minister. I don’t hate anybody who steps up in a democracy to do what’s one of the most thankless tasks: make decisions somebody will dislike. On the other hand, appreciation doesn’t require ignoring policy that seems misguided and hurtful: In this case, the niqab’s purported threat to the Canadian way.

There are about 500,000 Muslim women in Canada — about 3.1 per cent of all women. Of these, half were born here. Only half are of an age at which a niqab might be worn. Of these, the vast majority don’t wear the niqab.

So this xenophobic backlash is over a tiny fraction of a fraction of the population: way under one per cent. Any threat to the Canadian way is not from Muslim women wearing veils. The threat is permitting bigotry and stereotypes to drive public policy for politically expedient reasons.

Some letters challenged my numbers and questioned my arithmetic. Fair enough. On reviewing the column, these readers have a point, not because the numbers cited are wrong but because my statement of them was incomplete.

I cited the reported sexual assault rate of 68 per 100,000 without further context. So, here is the basis for estimating the 5.6 million sexual assaults in Canada since 2001.

The reported rate per 100,000 uses only formal reports to police. But police agencies, Justice Canada and Statistics Canada all agree that 94 per cent of sexual assaults against women go unreported.

The Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics says fewer than one in 10 sexual assaults are reported to police. Statistics Canada confirms similar rates of sexual victimization were reported in 2009, 2004 and 1999, so to project similar estimates from 2001 to 2015 is reasonable.

Both YWCA research and the federal government’s statistical surveys conclude that 460,000 women are sexually assaulted in Canada each year, although more recent data pegs the estimate for sexual assaults at 472,000.