I'd be charitable to their claim if they left it at 'every time', but to say the incidents are not due to sexism 'at all' is not a good argument, even interpreted figuratively.
That seems like an arbitrary place to draw a line; it still seems completely, unambiguously figurative to me, but I'm not going to argue the point.
> 'every time'
...is clearly figuratively as the commenter mentioned.