Research on the characteristic and gender differences in adult foot shape in China

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to obtain some new knowledge for manufacturing a sizing system for adult men’s and women’s shoes. In this paper, five quantitative indicators are used to describe the difference between male and female foot shapes. They are foot length, foot breadth, medial malleolus height and foot oblique width and ankle circumference. Firstly, descriptive statistical analysis are conducted to describe adult’s foot shape characteristics and how they differ among different age groups. The result showed that four indicators for adult men and women vary gently with age growing, other than the ankle circumference. At the same time, Empirical CDF (Cumulative Distribution Function) are plotted to compare the percentage difference for male and female among the five variables. The results showed that other than ankle circumference, percentile (5th to 95th percentile) of the other four variables are significantly different among men and women. Additionally, we conduct univariate t-tests to analyze the difference among the five variables. The results showed that when the level of significance is 0.05, the five variables for men and women are all significantly different and foot length has a higher difference among them. Overall the foot shape of male and female is different. At last, multivariate discriminant analyses are conducted to classify a large sample of individuals by gender. When the absolute values of the data were used to predict gender, the correct rate of the classifier is 91.5% (90.7% of the time for men and 92.3% of the time for women). Based on our study, we recommend that shoe manufacturers should mainly consider the effects of gender compared to age bracket when making adult shoes.