You are absolutely correct, and framing makes a huge difference on how such statements are perceived ("women are 65% the strength of men" vs "men are 50% stronger" vs "1 in hundred women stronger than average man").
But pointing out that there is a 30% area overlap glosses over the main point in this context in my opinion: If you are going to have any benchmark ("need to be this strong to safely pilot"), then that benchmark is either going to be trivial for most men or it's going to be almost impossible to meet for almost every woman.
I put this number here because it was quite surprising to me when I learned about this; naively, I would have expected something like 1/10 women to be stronger than an average man, but that is off by a lot.
This is actually why IMO saying women are 65% as strong as the average man is the better framing. It gives you an immediate, practical, and tangible goal. If the force required to do a given operation is acceptable for men and not acceptable for women, then we don’t need to reduce the force by 100x, we need to reduce it by 1.5x, which is not very much.
Talking about the standard deviation doesn’t give you a usable result, while talking about the ratio of means does.
BTW this argument should be moot. It’s very, very poor safety design to suggest that controlling a vehicle or doing anything else safety critical should require more than 50% of my maximum strength. My own strength varies considerably based on how much I have to use it. I can’t maintain my max strength if I have to do it repeatedly, and it will affect my ability to think if I have to use my max strength in a crisis situation. There simply should not be controls that require more force than most women can apply, not even close.
But pointing out that there is a 30% area overlap glosses over the main point in this context in my opinion: If you are going to have any benchmark ("need to be this strong to safely pilot"), then that benchmark is either going to be trivial for most men or it's going to be almost impossible to meet for almost every woman.
I put this number here because it was quite surprising to me when I learned about this; naively, I would have expected something like 1/10 women to be stronger than an average man, but that is off by a lot.