Implicit generalizing adverbs in sentences - all, always, usually

Question

Imagine I write statement (paraphrased) "Women like to wear different clothes to differentiate themselves from each other."

Is it more common for English speaking people to read it like

• "Women [usually] like to wear different clothes ..."

or rather like

• "[All] women like to wear different clothes ..."
• resp. "Women [always] like to wear different clothes ..."?

An additional question, could I assume in advance females may find it offensive, gender related as in below? As there can be differences between languages in perception of sentences.

My point is

• "Women like different clothes." is not generalism, but rather kind of a rule with implied exceptions. But it may be implied/perceived as generalism.
• "All women like different clothes" is generalism.

I do agree I should have used explicit formulations like "Many women usually like wearing/often wear ..", but the damage has been already done.

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The question context is that I, as a non-native EN speaker, once got into troubles with such a sentence in discussion with a female who assumed I stick to not acceptable gender stereotypes, as not all women are like that. I used the above sentence in a wider context of making human life analogy to a scientific scenario. I provided it as an example with intention to illustrate that people usually like to differ in various things, with women/clothes as one such particular option.

In lighter mood, I am curious if the statement "Women are polite/intelligent." would be objected too, as some are not polite a/o intelligent. If I wrote "Men like watching football.", it would not cause raising eye brows. "Everybody knows they do, except those who do not." Rules have their exceptions.

Answer 1

These days, when generalizing about groups of people (and yes, all your example statements are generalizing because you don't qualify which "women"), it's much more common to soften the language with hedges like "most", "usually", "often", "tend to" etc. rather than use strong statements like "all" or "always".

Merely beginning a sentence with "All women..." or "Women always..." is likely to offend a significant portion of the audience after only saying those two words.

Even relatively benign statements like "Women are polite/intelligent" or "Men like watching football" that do not include absolutist words like "all" or "always" are understood to be generalizations about the entire group, rather than observations about typical behaviour of men and women, and are therefore often considered offensive.

This is a product of the current times in the Western world, rather than an inherent property of the English language. As recently as the 1950s, statements like "Women are polite/intelligent" and "Men like watching football" were understood as normal descriptions of typical behaviour, rather than blanket statements, and they would have offended nobody.