this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
324 points (95.3% liked)

Technology

70467 readers
2588 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
L4s@hackingne.ws
324
The New York Times Just Published Some Bizarre Race Science About Asian Women (futurism.com)
submitted 4 days ago by andybytes@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
105 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] jsomae@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] zloubida@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This is not the dubious claim.

It is dubious.

[–] jsomae@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

To be clear, you're saying that asian women typically having smaller hands is dubious? I have to double-check because I'm astonished anyone doubts this.

[–] zloubida@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] jsomae@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 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.