Height Discrimination and Gender Bias: Unveiling the Impact on Social and Professional Lives
“Men under six feet need not apply.”
As someone over six feet tall, you would think I wouldn’t have an issue seeing this every time I go onto a dating app. But as someone who doesn’t have luxurious travel photos, a prestigious job, and who is terrified at the idea of posing for a shirtless photo, I feel like we all lose when we pin someone's value on a single characteristic or trait.
When I say we all lose, I mean the people that are discriminating, too.
Consider online dating. According to a former product manager at Bumble, the majority of women on the app set the minimum height of men they’ll match with at six feet tall, limiting them to 15% of the population. What about their sense of humour, caregiving ability, or communication skills? These are arguably more foundational for long-lasting relationships. These arbitrary dating criteria limit the likelihood that a user might meet someone compatible on the app. Why impose such a limit?
This is a trend that extends far beyond dating, too. We know there’s a racialized and gendered pay gap in the professional world, where women continue to earn less than men, and women of colour earn less than their white female counterparts. Did you know there is also a professional impact of height on earnings? One study suggests that people over 6 feet tall can earn over $166,000 more over the course of 30 years than someone who is five foot five inches. There’s discrimination against short people in hiring and promotion, too (Butera).
This is partly because of the ‘myth of tallness,’ where we, collectively, associate a bunch of culturally valued traits with height. Taller people are seen as more successful, wealthy, competent, capable leaders, and desirable partners. This, in turn, can create patterns of self-fulfilling prophecy.
You’ll notice that the traits associated with tallness — competence, wealth, status, leadership — are also traits we associate with masculinity. So, what is the association between patriarchal gender norms and height in our culture?
Height and Gender: Evolutionary Preference or Patriarchal Discrimination?
The issue of height and gender comes up in a lot of different ways, whether it's the way we talk about the issue or the way we treat people who fall anywhere outside of the average height range for the population.
One of the first things that comes up when discussing height discrimination is the pervasive idea that it's completely natural and unavoidable.
You don’t need to pull on this thread long before someone inevitably throws out the old “animal kingdom” narrative. You know the one: height equals power in nature, so it’s the same with humans. “Gorillas use height to establish an alpha male all the time. That’s why the biggest ones are always the leaders.” Yet we could equally argue that humans are more genetically like Bonobo monkeys, who build quite peaceful, nonhierarchical societies. Of course, we're also closely genetically related to chimpanzees who follow closer to gorillas in terms of organization...Look, my point is we could sit around all day comparing ourselves to monkeys, but we're not monkeys. We're people, using the internet.
So, we would argue that the case for height discrimination or preference as ‘biological’ or ‘evolutionary,’ is a bit flimsy. More than that, even as a proxy for health (i.e. taller people are healthier), that’s not necessarily true. While poor nutrition in childhood could influence height into adulthood, there is also simply a natural variation in height among humans — being shorter isn’t pathological.
It is, however, socially significant because we’ve made it so. While we could have chosen hand size or head circumference or any other random measure, we chose height — ostensibly as a measure of health, but have made it into a measure of worthiness.
What also happens when we equate being tall with being naturally powerful is that we — knowingly or not — reinforce patriarchy. The logic here is that since men, on average, are taller than women (again: on average!), they must “naturally” be more powerful and dominant.
“Thus, one reason tallness is considered powerful is because of its link to masculinity, in that the male body claims more space. On the flip side, the shorter body takes up less space, and is perceived as feminine, which invokes passivity and powerlessness. As masculinity equals power and value in American culture, height is then inexorably and intimately linked with power. In this way, patriarchy feeds heightism and tall privilege, which then cyclically reinforce patriarchy. Patriarchy is able to maintain itself by reproducing its ideologies through bodily dimensions like height”
(Butera, 2008, p.14; emphasis added).
This has profound implications for how people are treated in society and the way we respond to people who don’t fit within these patriarchal expectations.
How do height and gender impact how people are treated?
With regards to tall men, I can speak from experience here. For as long as I can remember, family events and weddings meant a non-stop barrage of remarks about my height: “Look at how tall you’re getting.” “You should be playing basketball!” “Masha Allah, Masha Allah!” and then they would do that fake spitting thing they do in some cultures to ward off evil spirits. Towards my twenties, I began wanting to spit back. Even as a boy who was celebrated for my height, it still felt strange and embarrassing to have my body discussed so openly in front of me.
Extremely tall men contend with other discomforts too: not being able to find clothes that fit, not having a fun time jamming themselves into small spaces like airplanes, smoking their heads on doorframes, and annoying comments about “the weather up there”. Yet overall, they are socially celebrated.
In the case of short women, they are often infantilized, under-estimated, and assumed to be more passive or powerless than their taller counterparts. A friend who is not quite 5 ft described how the autonomy of short women can be completely violated by people (mostly men) who physically pick them up without their consent.
Then there’s the subject of fetishization. Although some might be okay with it, the majority of people who find themselves being fetishized — regardless of height or gender — can find it very dehumanizing and jarring. One friend described dating a guy she later found out “had a thing” for extremely short women like her. She found it so unsettling; to be reduced to one trait felt like an erasure of everything else that made her human.
Short women (in contrast to tall men) experience the double oppression of being female and short.
Yet at the same time, tall men and short women also experience certain privileges for fitting into the patriarchal script — they don’t upset the story that we’re told about height and power and about “natural” or “biological” differences between men and women.
So what about short men and tall women?
Well, they represent an inversion of expectations and, therefore, a threat to patriarchy. If tall women and short men are not only possible but a natural and frequent occurrence, then the whole “men are taller and therefore more powerful” premise is pretty shaky.
Tall women might experience some of the power or privilege granted to tall men, but more often than not, they will be disempowered, vilified, fetishized, erased, and controlled. It’s less frequent now, but parents who were worried about their female children growing too tall in 1950s America could take them to the doctor for treatments that would purportedly stunt their growth and ensure they didn’t grow too tall. Meanwhile, the side effects included potential risks such as early onset of menstruation, liver damage, ovarian cysts, fertility issues, and increased risk of blood clots*.
Meanwhile, short men are vilified, feminized, and denigrated in ways that reflect and further entrench their status as “lesser,” and even as “not really men”.
Similar to tall women, a man’s short stature is pathologized and treated as something that needs “fixing.” Risky and painful limb-lengthening surgeries are becoming more common. Again, anxious parents have been encouraged to consider growth hormone treatment for their short male children — despite unknown health risks. This is relatively recent: in 2003 the US FDA approved the use of recombinant growth hormone to treat “short stature” in healthy children.
If growth hormones weren’t pursued, and a short man achieves other markers of patriarchal success instead, like a high-paying job, bigger muscles, fancy car, etc., then the insult levelled could be that he’s overcompensating or has a Napoleon complex. Interestingly, short men are often socially punished for attempts to “re-masculinize” themselves.
“I argue that at the heart of the matter – the urgency and focus on making short boys taller – lies the same patriarchal anxiety that creates such troubling representations of short men in popular culture. The short boy, who suggests femininity through a body occupying little space, signifies a lack of masculinity” (Butera, 2008, p. 69-70)
As Butera’s quote suggests, the reason short men are seen in such a negative light lies in their approximation to femininity – enforcing both the fear and hatred of the feminine with the devaluation of shorter people. In this way, our cultural disdain for short men hurts short men themselves and also feeds both misogyny and heightism, hurting both short people and all women.
So what can we do?
It may seem like gender and height discrimination are pretty firmly entwined and entrenched – but we know change is already underway.
We have a few questions to keep that change progressing:
Why isn’t height discrimination included in more human rights laws? In 2023, New York, added height and weight discrimination to other protected categories, like religion and sex, within the state’s human rights law – so it will now be illegal to discriminate against people on the basis of weight and height within housing or employment, for example. What’s stopping other governments from doing the same?
How could we change the ways we portray gender and height in the media? For instance, what’s stopping us from moving away from depictions of tall women or short men as stereotypical tropes and instead broadening them into nuanced, complex characters? Why not portray more couples made up of taller women and shorter men? Or why not show short men and tall women as romantic leads, particularly in stories that don’t revolve around their height as barriers to romance?
How could we change the way we talk about gender and height?
It may seem like punching up, but jabs about short men, small penis jokes, and remarks about “overcompensating” actually prop up patriarchy. This rhetoric reinforces that tallness, large penises, and other bodily or material markers of patriarchal masculinity are what give people power in society. What’s genuinely subversive or transformative would be challenging that rhetoric.
Similarly, how could we get more creative when we compliment people? Even compliments about tallness reinforce the outsized cultural value we place on height — can we think of more interesting compliments?
How can we question our preferences and understand that they’ve been shaped by the culture we live in? So we could ask ourselves, what are our preferences or patterns in dating? Why do we have a preference for shorter or taller partners? How much does that ultimately matter, and why, and to whom? What has influenced us to see height and gender the way we do? What might we be missing if we are focused on height above all other traits? How are we potentially upholding the myth of tallness? Or patriarchy? Or how might we be subverting them?
While it may be true that many women on dating apps are searching for taller men, how can we push back against misogynistic discourse? An excellent reality check is remembering that most people will end up in romantic relationships at some point in their lives and that many people are of average height. And while dating apps may seem like the only way couples are meeting, they’re not. Recent stats show that only 30% of Americans have ever used dating apps.
If you’re curious to dive into this topic with others, join our Deep Dive discussion on gender and height on April 14th at 10 am PT / 11 am MT / 1 pm ET. Join the Community to take part!
Alex Varoutas (he/him) is a volunteer with NGM. A curious and gifted speaker, he’ll never run out of stories, questions, and jokes! He will also make you an elaborate meal from scratch and share some songs from his eclectic music collection, if you ask nicely.
Veronika Elyk (she/her) is NGM’s community manager who works alongside our members and volunteers to build bridges, deepen understanding, and strengthen commitment to a world free from patriarchy. She’s a big fan of sour candies, books that make her cry, and the endless love of/for her friends. Catch her at NGM’s community events, or online!
*On the note of estrogen treatments, we in no way want to suggest that hormone treatments are something that is never appropriate for young people. Many young trans people are able to safely receive puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy that is life-changing and life-saving. Cisgender kids may also receive puberty blockers if they’re experiencing early onset of puberty. Of course, there are still health risks that are weighed, screened, and monitored by those young people, their doctors, and their families (World Professional Association for Transgender Health). The cases that Butera highlights in her research are when estrogen was provided to young cisgender girls solely to “stunt their growth”, which in many cases were the decisions of parents (more than the girls themselves) and did not really have the intended effect while having a host of side effects instead. For more information about the safety and efficacy of hormone treatments, consult WPATH.