A very large sample took the test, 1700 or so people, and what we see is is that there is a height bias. It seems quite substantial actually. It's on the order of other very large kinds of biases, things like race and age bias. We see it across all educational groups, across all ethnic groups. The degree of bias is 'in your face'. Height belongs right along things like race and age bias in the realm of anti-discrimination and it's only a matter of time before I believe we're going to have to pay attention to it.
- Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, Social Psychology Harvard University - from the documentary "S&M: Short and Male
One of the best predictors of your income is your height. Children who are tall, that advantage gives them a leg-up which they seem to carry with them forever. You don't have to go very far to find evidence that tall people are more successful. The average height of a Fortune 500 executive is something like six feet, which is roughly 3 inches taller than the male average. It's quite striking the difference in wages between short and tall people. It is speaking very roughly an averaging over what a lot of different researchers have found - about a thousand dollars a year per inch. That means if you're 6 inches taller than the guy next door and you're identical in all other ways you probably earn about $6,000 a year more, which is quite a lot. It's comparable to the sort of difference we see on the basis of race and of gender and of other very big things.
- Dr. Steven Landsburg, University of Rochester - from the documentary "S&M: Short and Male".
