When we were taught anthropometry during my mechanical engineering degree in the early 1990s, they placed great emphasis on the importance of identifying the correct population data to design for. We were warned that most readily available data was for fit young male adults recruited into the American military, but we were also told of a particularly fine example of designing to the wrong data.
Ford Australia built a production line in 1988 for the 1989-1994 Ford / Mercury Capri convertible. As it was primarily (90% of production) an export product for the USA, Ford in the US had a lot of input. The anthropometric data for the production line came from Detroit.
Detroit auto workers turned out to be mostly male, with a high proportion of African Americans.
The workforce at Broadmeadows in Australia were mostly recent Vietnamese immigrants.
To say that the data for African American males was not representative of a mixed sex Vietnamese workforce would be a polite understatement.