Research on the Characteristic and Gender Differences in Adult Hand Shape in China

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to develop some new knowledge for structuring a sizing system for men’s and women’s hand tools, gloves and so on. Firstly, the paper per-processed the obtained data and then conducted necessary descriptive statistical analysis to get a general knowledge. It described their hand shape characteristics and how they differ among different groups classified according to the age bracket. The results show that with age growing, the length of hand, the breadth of hand and index finger breadth, proximal for men are first increasing then decreasing, and the most obvious representative are 20-year-old and 50-year-old boundaries. With age growing for women, there are little changes for most indexes of hand measurements. Additionally, we conduct univariate t-tests and multivariate discriminant analyses for some age bracket to analyze gender differences in hand shape in a large sample of individuals. The results showed that overall men had longer and broader hands than women for a given stature. After normalization of the measurements by height, men and women were found to differ significantly in two hand shape variables. Classification by gender using absolute values was correct at least 92% of the time. After normalization of the measurements by hand length, classification was correct at least 88% of the time. This study demonstrated that female hands were not simply scaled-down versions of male hands but rather differ in a number of shape characteristics.