This effect is even more pronounced when examining satisfaction with actual partner height: women are most satisfied when their partner was 21 cm taller, whereas men are most satisfied when they were 8 cm taller than their partner.
I don’t have access to the full article, but it sounds like they didn’t examine the sliding scale of height preferences, by one’s own height.
The article says that taller people have a taller ideal height for their partners. And it also says that on average women’s preference is a partner 21cm taller than themselves, and men had a preference for 8cm shorter. But from the publicly available text, it doesn’t seem to report on whether that preferred delta between one’s own height and the ideal partner height changed with the absolute height of themselves.
So I’m curious: does the data support the conclusion that a 5’ (1.52m) woman would prefer a 5’8" (1.73m) partner, and that a 5’8" (1.73m) woman would also still prefer that 21cm/8 inch difference, looking for a 6’4" (1.94) partner? Or is there a sliding scale where already tall people aren’t exactly looking for excessively unusual outliers, and that the preference of tall women is something smaller than 21cm, such that the overall average might be that very short women prefer a big height difference but very tall women prefer a small height difference?
I am a 5’9" woman and prefer guys around my height, anecdotally all the women I know who want tall guys are themselves short.
It’s a weak preference but yeah I think since I go through life being around the same height as most guys I meet I don’t have such a strong association with height as a sex difference, if that makes sense.
That puts your ideal partner height roughly 1.8 SDs from the mean of acceptable male partner heights for all women your height…
Which works out to something like at least 70% of women your height disagreeing with your preference, or not having anything close to that preference range themselves.
Uh, ok, dropping out of math brain:
Yeah I totally get that as an explanation, and that it… just isn’t really something that important to you.
But!
This is less odd for me because I am a dude, and as the study shows, being ok with a roughly close height match, guy a little on the taller side, is the widespread ideal for guys, whereas women generally tend to hate this kind of setup, or uh, prefer it the least out if all possible partner height matchups.
So uh, all that being said:
So, if you’re single… well I uh, happen to be just an inch taller than you, I’ve uh, mentioned my uh, ideals, you’ve mentioned yours… would you happen to be into data-dumping autists as well?
Ha! I am probably old enough to be your mom and unfortunately for you my two straight daughters have partners. But worry not, medium height man of numbers. The benefit of being able to kiss without throwing my neck out, never having to move the seat in the car, I’m sure you can sell the benefits of same-height relationships to someone.
Well, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, and either way, pleasure talking with you, hah!
I suspect I am older than you think I am, but I appreciate an honest answer to that, all the same.
Yeah, I have been able to uh, ‘sell’ a similar height pairing in the past, it was good for a time, but I guess you could say she and I both had to ramble on, different desired life paths… and perhaps oddly, that’s happened to me with a few gals, something like a one to three year relationship, and then a split, sometimes mutual and amicable, sometimes very … not that.
C’est la vie.
Thank you for induldging my data-nerdiness enough to give an interesting, and honest, data oriented reply.
I don’t have access to the full article, but it sounds like they didn’t examine the sliding scale of height preferences, by one’s own height.
The 21cm vs 8cm is the mean, and their sample size was large enough to be statistically valid.
I did specifically quote the part that includes ‘best satisfied’.
Ie, the ‘ideal’ partner height.
Many people often choose partners that are … close enough to many ideal traits, weighting them in different and complex ways, often not even entirely fully concsious of the nature of how they weight or order their preferences, but thats all way outside of the scope of this paper.
Yep, its possible the uh preference differential changes as you approach extreme ends of height, but the problem is that, being a statistically representative sample, it doesn’t include many people who are very short, or very tall.
But from the publicly available text, it doesn’t seem to report on whether that preferred delta between one’s own height and the ideal partner height changed with the absolute height of themselves.
Yeah, that seems to be my take away as well, they don’t go into precisely that in the paper.
Or is there a sliding scale where already tall people aren’t exactly looking for excessively unusual outliers, and that the preference of tall women is something smaller than 21cm, such that the overall average might be that very short women prefer a big height difference but very tall women prefer a small height difference?
Apologies for shit tier resolution, I am on mobile:
‘Female’ meaning, the male-preferred height of a female partner, ‘Male’ meaning the female-prefered height of a male partner, so that… may be backwards depending on your inution for reading graphs.
Also these are 2 SD bounds, 95% CI, I kinda cropped out half the text that explains that, whoops.
So, yes, this effect you mention does exist… but they do not seem to focus on it in the paper.
Unfortunately, I am not seeing a visualization that or equation that more specifically and precisely answers your question of whether or not very tall or short men or women are less uh, height-choosy.
Perhaps I am missing it?
…
Here’s another way they visualize their data:
Now, here, ‘Men’ means men, ‘Women’ means women, and the x axis is [male height - female height].
So, very broadly, yeah you see that the sort of mutual sweet spot of both partners being decently satisfied with the height difference is roughly a man being 13ish cm, roughly 5 inches taller than a woman.
So, from that, maybe ‘Short King’ has a realistic shot with 4’10" women, not 4’ 7"?
???
…
We can also see that women’s satisfaction with a male partner’s height uh, nose dives as a women is asked about a man who is going from 13 cm taller than them, to the same height as them… but then does rebound once the heights are just inverted.
This is also the only situation where the man is less satisfied with the pairing than the woman, on average, (untill you get to men being about 18cm taller than the woman, then its roughly the same gap as the height difference increases) but the men have huge CI intervals in this instance, indicating many men actually don’t mind this much, and some men mind it extremely.
Meanwhile, women generally dislike being taller than their man, with a yes, expanded CI range, but far less than that of the man, indicating that this is a less variable and more common … anti-preference for most women, in general, than it is for men.
…
Somewhat oddly, to me at least, we also have this pattern:
The maximum gap in partner height satisfaction between men and women seems to be around a man being just about 3cm, or about 1 inch, taller than the woman.
For women broadly, this is the least desirable possible pairing, while for men, it would basically be nice if they were about 2 inches or about 5cm taller…, but its not that big a deal to them, they are not that far from their maximum satisfaction.
Meanwhile, this situation is the lowest scoring situation for women.
It is actually worse than the woman being taller than the man.
In case you have not guesed, I am a guy, and I find this … fairly confusing/interesting.
Basically this means there is a huge mismatch where guys are generally pretty ok with being just a bit taller than their gal, but women find this to be the worst, the lowest possible score they would broadly assign to a partner height difference situation, to such an extent that they’d actually be on average happier if her man was just actually shorter than her.
…
But anyway, yeah, unless I am missing something, it doesn’t look like this paper actually answers your question precisely.
What you mention, the uh, height-choosyness tapering off for tall women and very short men does occur to some extent, but we… don’t really seem to have that detailed to us, I am not seeing a way to mathematically compare the magnitude.
Also again worth noting, my ‘Short King’ scenario was kind of a worst case scenario, as it assumes all women would only go for their ideal partner scenario.
Some women do do this, but obviously not all, and some men also do this, but obviously not all… and numbers on the absolute or relative prevalence of that do not seem to be in this paper.
My question (do taller women have a preference for less height difference compared to shorter women) was actually answered by the graph, because the slope of the line is less than 1.
A 1.6m woman seems to most prefer a 1.78m partner (18cm taller), whereas a 1.8m woman seems to prefer a 1.89m partner (9cm taller). I other words, it’s not that they’re less choosy, it’s just that they expect a smaller delta when they themselves are tall.
Of course, the thick line in that graph doesn’t correspond with the headline numbers mentioned (21cm), but I also notice that the thick line isn’t the center of the acceptable range. That is, women seem to be more forgiving of people who are taller than their ideal than they are of people who are shorter than their ideal. That’s an interesting finding, too.
My question (do taller women have a preference for less height difference compared to shorter women) was actually answered by the graph, because the slope of the line is less than 1.
Wot.
If the slope of the line was less than one, it would point downward, descend, as it moves to the right.
None of the lines in graph 1 do this.
???
I am dumb, I described a slope of 0, not 1.
Derp.
That being said… every line on graph 1 has a slope less than 1, so this is not a meaningful evaluation to determine anything, in and of itself.
A 1.6m woman seems to most prefer a 1.78m partner (18cm taller), whereas a 1.8m woman seems to prefer a 1.89m partner (9cm taller). I other words, it’s not that they’re less choosy, it’s just that they expect a smaller delta when they themselves are tall.
Its not a delta, its a variance range. Delta typically refers to change over time.
Also, I am using ‘height-choosy’ as a colloquial way of saying that that variance range expands or contracts.
If the variance narrows, this is more height-choosy, if it expands, this is less height-choosy.
Also also, graph 1 shows the mean of the acceptable height range of a partner.
Not the ideal.
That’s graph 2.
More on that later.
…
Anyway, from graph 1, we can see that women actually get more height-choosy the shorter they are, as graph 1 shows the variance range for acceptable male heights contracting as the woman is shorter.
It also seems to contract more sharply for women than men, ie, the CI lines for preferred male height would intersect closer to the average height of women, than the CI lines for the preffered height of females intersect as compared to average male height.
…
But, there are not exact figures on that kind of math, this is what I meant by the paper not specifically going into detail about this, such thst we could get another single number that could be used as a ratio.
…
Basically, women get more height-choosy as they are themselves shorter, than men get height-choosy as they themselves are taller.
Shorter women height discriminate more than taller men do… is another way you could say that.
This bodes poorly for our Short King.
Of course, the thick line in that graph doesn’t correspond with the headline numbers mentioned (21cm), but I also notice that the thick line isn’t the center of the acceptable range.
The 21 cm vs 8 cm thing comes from the ideal height difference for each sex/gender, ie, the highest score on the second graph, graph 2 in my post.
Men, black dot, get their highest score at being 8cm taller, women, white dot, get their highest score at being 21cm shorter.
Ideal != mean of acceptable height ranges.
If you read the paper, you can find more explanation and a more detailed version of the 8 vs 21 ideal metric, with its own CI and SD and such.
I use 8 and 21 as rounded figures, so I don’t have to make things potentially even more overcomplicated, and also the authors themselves did this in their abstract.
That is, women seem to be more forgiving of people who are taller than their ideal than they are of people who are shorter than their ideal. That’s an interesting finding, too.
You’re still mixing up ‘ideal’ with ‘mean of acceptable range’.
But, if you make that replacement, then yes this is correct, this is a good point to make, unfrotunately this also bodes poorly for our Short King.
Not only does the mean of the acceptable male height drop more quickly as a woman is shorter, than the same for men as they get taller…
Yeah, the upper bound is further from the mean than the lower bound, ie, womens preferences generally skew toward accepting taller men, more than accepting shorter men.
every line on graph 1 has a slope less than 1, so this is not a meaningful evaluation to determine anything, in and of itself.
It’s meaningful to the only question I’ve asked, whether tall women prefer as large of an absolute height difference as short women do. The answer is no. Tall women prefer taller partners than short women prefer, but they prefer a smaller gap between themselves and their partners. According to the graph you posted (fig 1, which says it’s the confidence intervals for “preferred partner height”). As the paper explains:
We found that male height was positively correlated (r = .69; p < .001; N = 188) and that female height was negatively correlated with preferred partner height difference (r = .49; p < .001; N = 461; ESM Table 2). Thus, taller men and shorter women preferred larger height differences, i.e. the male partner being much taller, whereas shorter men and taller women preferred smaller height differences, i.e. the male partner being only slightly taller (in line with Pawlowski (2003)).
So I think I’m reading that graph correctly and you’re not. Your discussion of fig 2 seems to be talking about the part of the paper on people’s satisfaction with their partner heights, which is a different metric than preferred partner height.
Everything else you’re talking about is not particularly interesting to me, and wasn’t what I was asking about.
Delta typically refers to change over time.
Delta just means difference. A change over time is the delta of that variable over delta t.
I don’t have access to the full article, but it sounds like they didn’t examine the sliding scale of height preferences, by one’s own height.
The article says that taller people have a taller ideal height for their partners. And it also says that on average women’s preference is a partner 21cm taller than themselves, and men had a preference for 8cm shorter. But from the publicly available text, it doesn’t seem to report on whether that preferred delta between one’s own height and the ideal partner height changed with the absolute height of themselves.
So I’m curious: does the data support the conclusion that a 5’ (1.52m) woman would prefer a 5’8" (1.73m) partner, and that a 5’8" (1.73m) woman would also still prefer that 21cm/8 inch difference, looking for a 6’4" (1.94) partner? Or is there a sliding scale where already tall people aren’t exactly looking for excessively unusual outliers, and that the preference of tall women is something smaller than 21cm, such that the overall average might be that very short women prefer a big height difference but very tall women prefer a small height difference?
I am a 5’9" woman and prefer guys around my height, anecdotally all the women I know who want tall guys are themselves short.
It’s a weak preference but yeah I think since I go through life being around the same height as most guys I meet I don’t have such a strong association with height as a sex difference, if that makes sense.
That puts your ideal partner height roughly 1.8 SDs from the mean of acceptable male partner heights for all women your height…
Which works out to something like at least 70% of women your height disagreeing with your preference, or not having anything close to that preference range themselves.
Uh, ok, dropping out of math brain:
Yeah I totally get that as an explanation, and that it… just isn’t really something that important to you.
But!
This is less odd for me because I am a dude, and as the study shows, being ok with a roughly close height match, guy a little on the taller side, is the widespread ideal for guys, whereas women generally tend to hate this kind of setup, or uh, prefer it the least out if all possible partner height matchups.
So uh, all that being said:
So, if you’re single… well I uh, happen to be just an inch taller than you, I’ve uh, mentioned my uh, ideals, you’ve mentioned yours… would you happen to be into data-dumping autists as well?
=P
Ha! I am probably old enough to be your mom and unfortunately for you my two straight daughters have partners. But worry not, medium height man of numbers. The benefit of being able to kiss without throwing my neck out, never having to move the seat in the car, I’m sure you can sell the benefits of same-height relationships to someone.
Hahaha!
Well, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, and either way, pleasure talking with you, hah!
I suspect I am older than you think I am, but I appreciate an honest answer to that, all the same.
Yeah, I have been able to uh, ‘sell’ a similar height pairing in the past, it was good for a time, but I guess you could say she and I both had to ramble on, different desired life paths… and perhaps oddly, that’s happened to me with a few gals, something like a one to three year relationship, and then a split, sometimes mutual and amicable, sometimes very … not that.
C’est la vie.
Thank you for induldging my data-nerdiness enough to give an interesting, and honest, data oriented reply.
=D
The 21cm vs 8cm is the mean, and their sample size was large enough to be statistically valid.
I did specifically quote the part that includes ‘best satisfied’.
Ie, the ‘ideal’ partner height.
Many people often choose partners that are … close enough to many ideal traits, weighting them in different and complex ways, often not even entirely fully concsious of the nature of how they weight or order their preferences, but thats all way outside of the scope of this paper.
Yep, its possible the uh preference differential changes as you approach extreme ends of height, but the problem is that, being a statistically representative sample, it doesn’t include many people who are very short, or very tall.
Anyway:
https://annas-archive.org/md5/50413a744e4887cff238a542b59b19b2
Here’s the whole paper!
Yeah, that seems to be my take away as well, they don’t go into precisely that in the paper.
Apologies for shit tier resolution, I am on mobile:
‘Female’ meaning, the male-preferred height of a female partner, ‘Male’ meaning the female-prefered height of a male partner, so that… may be backwards depending on your inution for reading graphs.
Also these are 2 SD bounds, 95% CI, I kinda cropped out half the text that explains that, whoops.
So, yes, this effect you mention does exist… but they do not seem to focus on it in the paper.
Unfortunately, I am not seeing a visualization that or equation that more specifically and precisely answers your question of whether or not very tall or short men or women are less uh, height-choosy.
Perhaps I am missing it?
…
Here’s another way they visualize their data:
Now, here, ‘Men’ means men, ‘Women’ means women, and the x axis is [male height - female height].
So, very broadly, yeah you see that the sort of mutual sweet spot of both partners being decently satisfied with the height difference is roughly a man being 13ish cm, roughly 5 inches taller than a woman.
So, from that, maybe ‘Short King’ has a realistic shot with 4’10" women, not 4’ 7"?
???
…
We can also see that women’s satisfaction with a male partner’s height uh, nose dives as a women is asked about a man who is going from 13 cm taller than them, to the same height as them… but then does rebound once the heights are just inverted.
This is also the only situation where the man is less satisfied with the pairing than the woman, on average, (untill you get to men being about 18cm taller than the woman, then its roughly the same gap as the height difference increases) but the men have huge CI intervals in this instance, indicating many men actually don’t mind this much, and some men mind it extremely.
Meanwhile, women generally dislike being taller than their man, with a yes, expanded CI range, but far less than that of the man, indicating that this is a less variable and more common … anti-preference for most women, in general, than it is for men.
…
Somewhat oddly, to me at least, we also have this pattern:
The maximum gap in partner height satisfaction between men and women seems to be around a man being just about 3cm, or about 1 inch, taller than the woman.
For women broadly, this is the least desirable possible pairing, while for men, it would basically be nice if they were about 2 inches or about 5cm taller…, but its not that big a deal to them, they are not that far from their maximum satisfaction.
Meanwhile, this situation is the lowest scoring situation for women.
It is actually worse than the woman being taller than the man.
In case you have not guesed, I am a guy, and I find this … fairly confusing/interesting.
Basically this means there is a huge mismatch where guys are generally pretty ok with being just a bit taller than their gal, but women find this to be the worst, the lowest possible score they would broadly assign to a partner height difference situation, to such an extent that they’d actually be on average happier if her man was just actually shorter than her.
…
But anyway, yeah, unless I am missing something, it doesn’t look like this paper actually answers your question precisely.
What you mention, the uh, height-choosyness tapering off for tall women and very short men does occur to some extent, but we… don’t really seem to have that detailed to us, I am not seeing a way to mathematically compare the magnitude.
Also again worth noting, my ‘Short King’ scenario was kind of a worst case scenario, as it assumes all women would only go for their ideal partner scenario.
Some women do do this, but obviously not all, and some men also do this, but obviously not all… and numbers on the absolute or relative prevalence of that do not seem to be in this paper.
My question (do taller women have a preference for less height difference compared to shorter women) was actually answered by the graph, because the slope of the line is less than 1.
A 1.6m woman seems to most prefer a 1.78m partner (18cm taller), whereas a 1.8m woman seems to prefer a 1.89m partner (9cm taller). I other words, it’s not that they’re less choosy, it’s just that they expect a smaller delta when they themselves are tall.
Of course, the thick line in that graph doesn’t correspond with the headline numbers mentioned (21cm), but I also notice that the thick line isn’t the center of the acceptable range. That is, women seem to be more forgiving of people who are taller than their ideal than they are of people who are shorter than their ideal. That’s an interesting finding, too.
Wot.If the slope of the line was less than one, it would point downward, descend, as it moves to the right.None of the lines in graph 1 do this.???I am dumb, I described a slope of 0, not 1.
Derp.
That being said… every line on graph 1 has a slope less than 1, so this is not a meaningful evaluation to determine anything, in and of itself.
Its not a delta, its a variance range. Delta typically refers to change over time.
Also, I am using ‘height-choosy’ as a colloquial way of saying that that variance range expands or contracts.
If the variance narrows, this is more height-choosy, if it expands, this is less height-choosy.
Also also, graph 1 shows the mean of the acceptable height range of a partner.
Not the ideal.
That’s graph 2.
More on that later.
…
Anyway, from graph 1, we can see that women actually get more height-choosy the shorter they are, as graph 1 shows the variance range for acceptable male heights contracting as the woman is shorter.
It also seems to contract more sharply for women than men, ie, the CI lines for preferred male height would intersect closer to the average height of women, than the CI lines for the preffered height of females intersect as compared to average male height.
…
But, there are not exact figures on that kind of math, this is what I meant by the paper not specifically going into detail about this, such thst we could get another single number that could be used as a ratio.
…
Basically, women get more height-choosy as they are themselves shorter, than men get height-choosy as they themselves are taller.
Shorter women height discriminate more than taller men do… is another way you could say that.
This bodes poorly for our Short King.
The 21 cm vs 8 cm thing comes from the ideal height difference for each sex/gender, ie, the highest score on the second graph, graph 2 in my post.
Men, black dot, get their highest score at being 8cm taller, women, white dot, get their highest score at being 21cm shorter.
Ideal != mean of acceptable height ranges.
If you read the paper, you can find more explanation and a more detailed version of the 8 vs 21 ideal metric, with its own CI and SD and such.
I use 8 and 21 as rounded figures, so I don’t have to make things potentially even more overcomplicated, and also the authors themselves did this in their abstract.
You’re still mixing up ‘ideal’ with ‘mean of acceptable range’.
But, if you make that replacement, then yes this is correct, this is a good point to make, unfrotunately this also bodes poorly for our Short King.
Not only does the mean of the acceptable male height drop more quickly as a woman is shorter, than the same for men as they get taller…
Yeah, the upper bound is further from the mean than the lower bound, ie, womens preferences generally skew toward accepting taller men, more than accepting shorter men.
It’s meaningful to the only question I’ve asked, whether tall women prefer as large of an absolute height difference as short women do. The answer is no. Tall women prefer taller partners than short women prefer, but they prefer a smaller gap between themselves and their partners. According to the graph you posted (fig 1, which says it’s the confidence intervals for “preferred partner height”). As the paper explains:
So I think I’m reading that graph correctly and you’re not. Your discussion of fig 2 seems to be talking about the part of the paper on people’s satisfaction with their partner heights, which is a different metric than preferred partner height.
Everything else you’re talking about is not particularly interesting to me, and wasn’t what I was asking about.
Delta just means difference. A change over time is the delta of that variable over delta t.