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Comment on The New York Times Just Published Some Bizarre Race Science About Asian Women

jsomae@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

The use of “race science” in this headline has been bugging me and I only just realized why. Questionable race science would be claiming that e.g. asian women think in some particularly useful way, or any other specific claim about race that is hard to prove. But it’s actually quite easy to show asian women have small hands, I assume – at least, it seems to me like asian women do tend to have much smaller hands than men of other races. This is not the dubious claim. The dubious claim is whether those smaller hands are useful or not.

I am not really sure what to make of this, I’m still grappling with this one. Just thought I’d share my scattered thoughts.

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zloubida@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

This is not the dubious claim.

It is dubious.

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- jsomae@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  To be clear, you’re saying that asian women typically having smaller hands is dubious?
  
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  - zloubida@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    From the article :
    
    For one thing, it’s not even clear that the claim that Chinese women have small fingers is even true. Research on global hand size is lacking, but one study found that the average Chinese person has a hand size approximately equal to that of the average German. An analysis of hand size around the world, though it didn’t include China, found that even the largest average differences in women’s hand size between countries was negligible.
    
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    jsomae@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Interesting! I wouldn’t have expected germans and chinese people to have similar hand sizes, given their heights differ.
    
    The study you linked right off the bat claims that women from the Philippines have markedly larger hand sizes than other women. I notice that analysis doesn’t include standard deviation or calculate statistical significance. It also looks like women from vietnam have smaller hand sizes, which is not surprising to me, because people from vietnam tend to be shaped in a way that is different from people from other countries, though I don’t know why.
    
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