The "Man or Bear" thing is about which a woman would feel safer with. It's not statistics. It's perception of risk.

If their perception of risk is wildly inaccurate, then the conversation needs to shift to that. That would be like saying: "I don't eat fruit because it contains live bees. This isn't about if or not fruit actually contains live bees, it's about how I choose to live my life."... Really, you can frame your fruit issue however you want, but addressing the fact that fruit doesn't contain live bees should be priority number one.

Besides, I wasn't making a comment on the purpose of the discussion, I was just addressing the statistics you, yourself, raised. It's especially important to look at them logically if someone were about to base their choice on bumping into a bear vs bumping into a man on them, but believed that they showed an elevated risk per random man compared to per random bear.

But by the same token seeing a brown bear in the woods isn't a death sentence.

That's true, and that was also part of my point. It wouldn't be fair to say every contact with a bear is doomed to end in being eaten alive while on the phone with your mother over 3 hours or so. In fact, for every reported "Bear Interaction", I bet there's another, undocumented one where the person simply never tells anyone what happened, or they don't even see the near by bear.

I'll bet there's even a few where both parties, bear and person, are totally unaware, like some Warner Brothers cartoon skit where they both hear something move, lean up against the same tree, but peak around the opposite sides and totally miss each other.

With that said, you likely still pass more random men on a hiking trail than you do bears, let alone when you get back to the city, catch a bus, go to work and so on... Unless you work in a zoo, specifically caring for the bears, I guess? Then it might be a toss up.