I wonder why they're using body fat percentage instead of BMI. While the two are strongly correlated [1], BMI seems more gender neutral.
[1] https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1...
[1] https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1...
Different body fat percentages for men and women is likely how they already do it.
And it doesn't work well for the general population, anyway; it's a bad metric across the board. If you're very tall or very short, it misrepresents you. There are equally simple measures like waist-to-height ratio that have fewer issues.
See this article: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/265215#Waist-to-he...
BMI works for the average person but cannot differentiate between extra muscle mass and extra fat mass.
on the topic of diversity, BMI often cannot be compared between ethnic/race groups: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4968570/
My guess is that they use different BMI metrics for men vs women when guaging fitness--that's how they keep things gender fair.
It's complicated.
I'm sure that military members are, on average, more muscular than civilians. But they're not typically very jacked compared to body builders or powerlifters.
Moderate strength with high endurance (e.g. crossfit) is much more useful in combat than high strength but low endurance (e.g. powerlifting).
And moderate strength with high endurance doesn't typically result in huge muscles.
Having spent some time in the military, this generally aligns with my observations. Sure - there's some people who are jacked. But most people - even really elite guys - look pretty unassuming.
It works as a rough guide as it is easer to calculate than body fat percentage. Most people that go to the gym don't have much muscle; so unless someone is a dedicated bodybuilder or powerlifter it's good enough. You can tell just by looking at someone if they have large amounts of body fat!