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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how useful averages are since you can be (almost) arbitrarily fat, but die very quickly when you're even a little underweight. I guess the minimum waist size for an adult female is still double-digit inches, but I wouldn't dare guess the maximum waist size.

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Oh yeah, as noted in parallel comments, averages are terrible for things like designing airplane cockpits, and I imagine crash dummies as well.

Even if there's an unexpected distribution, that's no way around there being a massive number of very obese women to pull the average to 38".

I thought my wife was pretty normal/average-ish at 5'4" and size 6/8, which is a full 10" smaller waist than the web is claiming as the average.

Note that a 10" shorter waist is only about 1.5" on a side (diameter of 9 inches vs 12) which is noticeable but not as much as "10 inches" would make you think.

That difference is visually absolutely vast - for the same height, in most sizing charts, it's approximating a 50% increase in body mass.

I was at Boeing when the cockpits were redesigned to accommodate women:

1. lower control forces

2. shorter legs

3. shorter bodies (need to see over the dash)

With the lower control forces, Boeing was concerned that men would then overcontrol the aircraft, but as far as I know this hasn't turned out to be a problem.

Women were not strong enough to handle the control forces in WW2 aircraft under emergency conditions. Those airplanes were designed around the limit of a man's strength.

In case anyone is curious

> In 2016 in the US, adult women averaged a weight of 170.3 lb. The median adult woman weighed 161.3 lb.

> For men in the United States 18 or older in 2016, average weight was 197.1 lb. Men had a median weight of 189.4 lb.

I guess it makes sense that even the median weight would lead to an overweight BMI (assuming average height), since 74% of the US is overweight or obese.

[1] https://dqydj.com/weight-percentile-calculator-men-women/

Admittedly I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this or attempting to guess the weight of strangers, but this gender breakdown seems a bit odd to me— in my circles and community exposure (west of Toronto), I would have imagined that most guys fell into a 180-220 bucket, and most women into a 120-150 one.

So it's a bit surprising to see that in these official US numbers, men are indeed around that, but women are somewhat above it.

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