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.

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.

He played 7 seasons in the NBA, was kinda a journeyman playing backup center for a bunch of different teams.

But her height is actually useful. She’s a starter in a sport in which height is a useful physical trait, which helped her with university admissions with a scholarship. She’s apparently a professional who has been on the roster of some overseas teams, and plays for her national team (Canada).

Plus growing up in a family with tall people might make it easier to deal with. Her dad is former NBA player Mike Smrek and presumably has a social circle of very tall people and maybe even their very tall children.

So I don’t doubt that a lot of tall women actively dislike their own height. But this particular woman probably has reason to like being tall.

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?