Very few women are of the expected size (5' 9" tall) aimed to represent the average male; most women automatically falls into the "too short / other-wise-outside-of-the-norm" as far as car safety testing was concerned until recently - AFAIK cars made since 2012 should be also tested on smaller, female-sized dummies which also created an incentive to alter how they are built.

Well if that's it then making a list of "too short, too tall, a woman" is double-counting.

Also if you take it as exactly 5'9" then airbags aren't suitable for men either. What you need to do is examine the range it's designed for. It's not the average height that matters, it's what percent of men/women fall inside that range. There might be a significant difference in that percent, or there might not be.

There is no such thing as an "average" person: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

That analysis has been done, and there is a significant difference in that amount. You can back-of-the-envelope it yourself if you know that the average height of a woman in the US is 5'4" with a standard deviation of about 3.5".