Do women like taller men? British and Polish researchers have now provided statistical proof for a fact that many men have always suspected: tall guys have a better chance at succeeding with women. According to a study of over 4,400 Polish men, fathers are - on average - three centimeters taller than men who remain childless. The researchers conclude that height plays an important role in sexual selection. Only when there is a shortage of men do women place less emphasis on their partners' size - a fact that the researchers can back up with numbers from the postwar era. Because there was an overall shortage of men, short men became fathers more often. It took several decades for tall guys to recover their statistical lead. | World's tallest man |
Are tall people treated differently? On a conscious level, I'm sure that all of us don't think that we treat tall people any differently from short people. But there's plenty of evidence to suggest that height--particularly in men--does trigger a certain set of very positive, unconscious associations. I polled about half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list--the largest corporations in the United States--asking each company questions about its CEO. The heads of big companies are, as I'm sure comes as no surprise to anyone, overwhelmingly white men, which undoubtedly reflects some kind of implicit bias. But they are also virtually all tall: In my sample, I found that on average CEOs were just a shade under six feet. Given that the average American male is 5'9" that means that CEOs, as a group, have about three inches on the rest of their sex. But this statistic actually understates matters. In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or over. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 percent. Even more strikingly, in the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are 6'2" or taller. Among my CEO sample, 30 percent were 6'2" or taller. |
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Your Height: NA | Value: $0 (Under 16) |
*We only value your height if you are older than 16. |
How did we calculate your results? Men under 5' and over 6'10 were penalized heavily. The idela height for a man was between 6'2 and 6'6 and received the most value. The ideal height for a woman was considered to be between 5'8 and 5'10. Women over 6'4 and under 5' were penalized. |
Is height more important than gender or race? Of the tens of millions of American men below 5'6", a grand total of ten--in my sample--have reached the level of CEO, which says that being short is probably as much, or more, of a handicap to corporate success as being a woman or an African-American. Source - Blink by Malcolm Gladwell |
Fact: Of 43 American presidents, only five have been more than a smidgeon below average height, and the last of those was Benjamin Harrison, elected in 1888. (Another three, most recently Jimmy Carter, were just a hair below average.) Most presidents have been several inches above the norm for their times, with the five tallest being Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, and Franklin Roosevelt. |