The health risks of wearing the wrong size and why standard length measurements are failing women

More than two-thirds of Australian women are wearing shoes that do not match the size of their feet, a study suggests.

The discrepancy is likely to have several causes, including baffling inconsistencies between brands for the same sizes. But the central problem seems to be that most shoes are sized for length, not width, according to researchers.

And wearing the wrong-sized shoe can have significant health costs.

“There are serious health implications if you’re not wearing proper-sized shoes,” says Associate Professor Saniyat Islam, a fashion researcher at RMIT and co-author of the study.

“Women are not bad at shopping. This is a universal problem with our industry.”

The research, published earlier this year in the International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education, began with an insight by lead author Barbara Pallaspuro, who was working at the time in shoe retail.

Women kept coming in and telling her they wore a certain size shoe – but when Pallaspuro measured their feet, the results were strikingly different.

Could the problem be widespread? To test her hunch, Pallaspuro and a team from RMIT recruited 107 women who volunteered their usual shoe size.

Then they measured their feet in the lab.

Seventy-two per cent of women were in the wrong shoe size, according to the lab measurements. “It shocked us,” says Islam.

The size differences varied widely: some women were out by only half a size, others were putting size 4 feet in size 7 shoes.

One woman was trying to cram size 8.5 feet into size 7 shoes, but most of the women studied were wearing shoes that were slightly too large.

If the shoe fits …

Historically, shoes were custom-made. That makes sense given the wide variation in foot width (known as girth, measured at the ball of the foot), length and shape. For example, 93 of the 107 volunteers had left and right feet of different sizes.

But the bigger problem, Islam says, is that EU and British shoe sizes are delineated in length, not girth.

Nike lists its size 5 women’s shoes as 22 centimetres long and its size 14.5 as 30 centimetres long. Each size in between increases by .4 or .5 centimetres.

As length increases, so does a shoe’s width (to complicate matters, different brands’ sizes vary by up to 3.5 centimetres for the same size).

Human feet do not work the same way. Long feet can be narrow and short feet can be wide.

“Feet are not one-dimensional. It’s as 3D object,” says Islam. “We are trying to compensate for everything with a single measure – length. There lies the problem. We do not provide the girth or the arch size.”

To get the right width, women are forced to choose shoes of an incorrect length or vice versa, says Islam.

This problem is less acute for men, who often wear shoes with laces. “We can compensate the girth problem with the laces,” says Islam. “You can tighten it up or loosen it up.”

Health effects

The results don’t surprise podiatrist Laura Kelly, spokeswoman for the Australian Podiatry Association. “It would be one of the most common problems we see,” she says. “And often, they think they are wearing the right size shoe.”

She ticks off a list of problems linked to ill-fitting shoes: bunions, wounds, ingrown nails, nerve compression, an increased risk of falls. Some of these conditions are driven by genetic risk factors, but are triggered or worsened by ill-fitting shoes. “Lots of quite serious things can come from this,” says Kelly.

“A lot of people, I think, put up with a certain level of discomfort. They think it’s normal. It’s not normal to have discomfort, neuromas, corns, ingrown nails. There is a lot you can do about it. Maybe people put up with things they shouldn’t.”

What to do?

Not all shoe systems have the same problem. Japanese and Chinese shoe size charts include foot girth; China’s system even allows shoes to be sized according to width.

Companies selling in Australia know the width of the shoe they are selling – they just don’t report it to consumers. “It baffles me,” says Islam. “They take the measurements, but they don’t disclose it. Consumers need that data to fit their feet properly.”

Several Australian brands have started making shoes of differing widths, says Dr Alexandra Sherlock, founder of the Footwear Research Network (she was not involved in the study). But they are much more expensive than mass-produced shoes.

“We have got into a habit of buying very cheap shoes, cheaply produced, out of cheap non-renewable materials,” says Sherlock. “We’ve got into really bad habits, and we don’t even realise.”

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