Apparently, size does matter.
According to a recent report by the University of Florida, tall people earn considerably more money than their shorter counterparts throughout life. They earn approximately $789 more per inch, per year, according to the experts.
Timothy Judge and Daniel Cable, both business professors — Judge at UF and Cable at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — analyzed the results of four large-scale research studies to come up with their conclusions.
Of the four studies used, three were conducted in the United States and one in Great Britain. All four studies followed thousands of participants from childhood to adulthood, examining details of their work and personal lives in order to come up with conclusions on success and habits.
Judge’s study, which controlled for gender, weight and age, found that mere inches cost thousands of dollars. Each inch in height amounted to about $789 more a year in pay, the study found. So someone who is 7 inches taller — say 6 feet versus 5-foot-5 — would be expected to earn $5,525 more annually, he said.
“If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it, we’re talking about literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage that a tall person enjoys,” Judge said.
Judge and Cable looked at subjective ratings of work performance to decipher the reasoning behind this income gap, such as supervisors’ evaluations of how effective someone is on the job, as well as objective measures of performance, including sales volume. The professors concluded that height might have the effect of boosting employees’ self-confidence, which in turn makes them more successful, prompting people to attribute more status and respect to tall people.
“If height has the social status we think it does, it stands to reason that tall people would sell more cars because they’re seen as a more authoritative source on the matter,” Judge said.
Daniel Hamermesh, professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, has done research in the past to decipher the effects of looks on teacher evaluations, and said he is not surprised by the UF study’s results.
“This result is no surprise at all,” he said. “In fact, there is a very large number of studies, going back at least 30 years, in the economics and sociology literature, demonstrating this very point,” Hamermesh said. “Height, independent of weight or looks, has a beneficial effect on earnings. However, there is some evidence that going above very, very tall (above 6-foot-6) may level off or even turn the beneficial effects around.”
Hamermesh’s study, which was also released this year, found that attractive professors consistently outscore their less comely colleagues by a significant margin on student evaluations of teaching. Hamermesh and his co-worker Amy Parker also found that the effect of beauty (or lack thereof) on teaching evaluations for men was three times as great as it was for women.
And though it may seem hard to believe that a society so highly evolved as the human race could still judge on the basis of appearance, Judge is not surprised.
“When humans evolved as a species and still lived in the jungles or on the plain, they ascribed leader-like qualities to tall people because they thought they would be better able to protect them,” Judge said. “Although that was thousands of years ago, evolutionary psychologists would argue that some of those old patterns still operate in our perceptions today.”
The average height of Americans today is 69.1 inches — about 5-foot-9 — for men and 63.7 inches — nearly 5-foot-4 — for women.
The economic implications of the study’s results worry Judge.
“If we have a bias against short people and that bias is not shared by other countries, we have placed ourselves at a competitive disadvantage,” he said. “If we’re giving great weight to an attribute like height that’s irrelevant to performance on the job, then we’re introducing error in our hiring and promotion decisions that causes inefficiencies in our economy.”
