Height prejudices don’t always measure up

Conventional wisdom has it that taller men make more money, get more dates and are more likely to win a presidential election. Shorter women aren’t taken seriously, and boys and girls both suffer psychologically well into adulthood if they’ve grown up the shortest in their class. Right?

Well, maybe … or maybe not. What people thought they knew about the height advantage doesn’t always hold up to the cold eye of psychological and sociological research. Experts are digging into data on the consequences of shortness, and although recent studies validate some of society’s long-held assumptions about height, others are getting chipped away – even dismissed.

“There is little or no evidence that making short people taller changes their lives in any meaningful way,” says Dr. Norman Fost, professor of pediatrics and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin Medical School.

The reality of the relative advantages of being tall is increasingly important because in 2003 the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of synthetic growth hormone for kids with idiopathic short stature, or shortness for no apparent medical reason.

The treatment, an injection every day for many years, is expensive and not consistently covered by insurers. The average benefits – an increase of about 2 inches in height – are modest. Although no one expects ill health consequences down the road, no one knows for sure what might happen. And critics say all this risk and expense is aimed at altering healthy children who are objects of social prejudice, rather than addressing the prejudice itself.

There’s little doubt that short kids get teased, even occasionally ridiculed. But most grow up to do just as well as their taller taunters. Take the common perception that employers discriminate against short men in hiring and income. It turns out the much-touted income advantage of height is linked more closely to high school experiences than to hiring practices in the adult workplace. And when brothers are studied, one tall and one short, the two have the same employment opportunities and income, regardless of height.

“There’s still a widespread perception that male success is measured in (physical) stature,” says Dalton C. Conley, chairman of the sociology department at New York University. “But in terms of total income, earnings and occupational outcomes, the male height issue is really a red herring.”

Other widely held notions about short people do hold up. Based on history, there can be no doubt that Americans like their presidents tall. And on the dating scene, women go for taller men. When it comes to romance, height is often a deal-breaker.

Children who can be treated for idiopathic short stature are the shortest 1.2 percent, measuring 2.25 or more standard deviations below the mean, according to FDA guidelines. That translates, for 10-year-old boys and girls, to 4 feet, 1 inch and to a projected adult height of under 4 feet, 11 inches for females and 5 feet, 3 inches for males.

Treatment with growth hormone helps some, but not all, children grow taller. Medical tests cannot predict in advance which children will respond. In general, growth hormone works best when started younger, given in higher doses and administered for longer periods of time. On average, treatment helps children grow taller – but not much.

Shorter men, of course, aren’t completely out of the running romantically. But they, along with taller-than-average women, are fishing in a smaller pond.

As discouraging as that news might be to short people, it apparently doesn’t hurt them psychologically. David Sandberg, pediatric psychologist and director of child behavioral health at the University of Michigan, has spent decades studying the effect of short stature on psychological development. He has found none.

“The data from multiple studies show that you can’t distinguish between short kids and average and tall kids in their educational and psychological development,” Sandberg says. His concern over the FDA approval of growth hormone for healthy, short children is that medical treatment sends the wrong message. “You communicate that something is wrong,” he says, “and so wrong that it justifies daily injections for years.”

Sure, short kids get teased, he says. And throughout elementary school, they are often treated as younger than their years. But they get over it.

Even through the hurtful school years, short kids have friends – often tall friends. “We found short kids had as many reciprocated friendships as kids with tall stature,” Sandberg says. “The friends weren’t matched by height in any manner.”

But the real nitty-gritty of the so-called height advantage is money. Tall men make more money.

That has been borne out by multiple studies, including one reported in the October 2004 Journal of Political Economy. Researchers reported that for white men in the United States, every additional inch of height is associated with a 1.8 percent increase in wages. The tallest quarter of the population earns 13 percent more than the shortest quarter.

But those same researchers, from the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed the data further. They found that increased income isn’t associated with final adult height. Rather, boys who are taller in their teen years, even if their final height was average or short, earned more than boys who were short during adolescence, even if their final adult height was tall.

So short men who went through a tall spell in high school, around the age of 16, but then stopped growing had similar earning power to tall men who were short at 16, then had a growth spurt. It’s likely, the researchers say, that the workplace isn’t discriminating against short men. Rather, those men who were shorter than their peers in high school might have missed out on opportunities in dating, sports and other activities that teach kids skills that the work force will some day value. “Those who were relatively short when young were less likely to participate in social activities associated with the accumulation of productive skills,” the paper reported.

Conley of NYU studied the income research from yet another angle. In a May 2005 National Bureau of Economic Research online publication, Conley looked at brothers raised in the same home with one brother ending up short, the other tall. Conley found no income differences. “When you compare brothers with the same diet, the same cultural background and educational opportunities, it turns out that male height has no effect,” he says. “The notion is still very strong that there’s a social bias against short men. But they do just fine despite that perception.”

More than half the kids being treated with growth hormone for unexplained short stature are boys. When girls are referred, according to a February 2005 study in the Journal of Pediatrics, they show up at the doctor’s office later – 35 months after falling off their expected growth curve, compared with 24 months for boys.