SESSION 1 – CASE STUDY
► height and marriage
BUSINESS ANALYTICS II – WINTER 2016
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article belong to the author only. I do not endorse any claim made in the
article, the material is used for instructional purposes only.
Why It's So Rare for a Wife to Be Taller Than Her Husband
Original Article from “The Atlantic”. Available at http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/why-its-so-rare-fora-wife-to-be-taller-than-her-husband/272585/
Men are bigger and stronger than women. That
generalization, although true, doesn't adequately describe
how sex affects our modern lives.
In the first place, men's and women's size and strength are
distributions. Strong women are stronger than weak men, so
sex doesn't tell you all you need to know. Otherwise, as
retired colonel Martha McSally put it with regard to the ban
on women in combat positions, "Pee Wee Herman is OK to
be in combat but Serena and Venus Williams are not going
to meet the standard."
Second, how we handle that average difference is a matter
of social construction: We can ignore it, minimize it, or
exaggerate it. In the realm of love and marriage, we so far
have chosen exaggeration.
Consider height. The height difference between men and
women in the U.S. is about 6 inches on average. But Michael
J. Fox, at five feet, five inches, is shorter than almost half of
all U.S. women today. On the other hand, at five-foot-ten,
Michelle Obama is taller than half of American men. So how
do people match up romantically, and why does it matter?
Because everyone knows men are taller on average,
straight couples in which the man is shorter raise a problem
of gender performance.
That is, the man might not be seen as a real man, the woman
as a real woman, if they don't (together) display the normal
pattern. To prevent this embarrassment, some couples in
which the wife is taller might choose to be photographed with
the man standing on a step behind the woman, or they might
have their wedding celebrated with a commemorative stamp
showing her practically on her knees—as the British royals
did with Charles and Diana, who were both the same height:
five foot ten.
But the safer bet is just to match up according to the height
norm. A new study from Britain—which I learned of from the
blogger Neuroskeptic—measured the height of the parents
of about 19,000 babies born in 2000. They found that the
woman was taller in 4.1 percent of cases. Then they
compared the couples in the data to the pattern found if you
scrambled up those same men and women and matched
them together at random. In that random set, the woman
was taller in 6.5 percent of cases. That means couples are
more often man-taller, woman-shorter than would be
expected by chance. Is that a big difference? I can explain.
For illustration, and to compare the pattern with the U.S., I
downloaded the 2009 Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a
U.S survey that includes height reported for 4,600 married
couples. These are the height distributions for those
spouses, showing a median difference of 6 inches.
CASE STUDY: Why It's So Rare for a Wife to Be Taller Than Her Husband
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SESSION 1 – CASE STUDY
► height and marriage
BUSINESS ANALYTICS II – WINTER 2016
Why It's So Rare for a Wife to Be Taller Than Her Husband (continued)
Clearly, if these people married (and didn't divorce) at
random we would expect the husband to be taller most of
the time. And that is what we find. Here is the distribution of
height differences from those same couples: (First diagram
on the right).
The most common arrangement is the husband five to six
inches taller, and a small minority of couples—3.8 percent—
are on the left side of the red line, indicating a taller wife.
But does that mean people are seeking out taller-husbandshorter-wife pairings? To answer that, we compare the
actual distribution with a randomized outcome. I made 10
copies of all the men and women in the data, scrambled
them up, and paired them at random.
This is the result. (Second diagram on the right). Most
couples are still husband taller, but now 7.8 percent have a
taller wife—more than twice as many. Here are the two
distributions superimposed, which allows us to see which
arrangements are more or less common in the actual
pairings than we would expect by chance. (Third diagram on
the right).
Now we can see that from same-height up to "man 7 to 8
inches taller", there are more couples than we would expect
by chance. And below same-height—where the wife is
taller—we see fewer in the population than we would expect
by chance. (There also are relatively few couples at the manmuch-taller end of the spectrum—at 9 inches or greater—
where the difference apparently becomes awkward, a
pattern also seen in the British study.)
Now we can see that from same-height up to "man 7 to 8
inches taller", there are more couples than we would expect
by chance. And below same-height—where the wife is
taller—we see fewer in the population than we would expect
by chance. (There also are relatively few couples at the manmuch-taller end of the spectrum—at 9 inches or greater—
where the difference apparently becomes awkward, a
pattern also seen in the British study.)
CASE STUDY: Why It's So Rare for a Wife to Be Taller Than Her Husband
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SESSION 1 – CASE STUDY
► height and marriage
BUSINESS ANALYTICS II – WINTER 2016
Why It's So Rare for a Wife to Be Taller Than Her Husband (continued)
Humans could couple up differently, if they wanted to. If it
were desirable to have a taller woman & shorter man
relationship, it could be much more common. In these data,
we could find shorter husbands for 28 percent of the wives.
Instead, people exaggerate the difference by seeking out
taller-man-shorter-woman pairings for marriage (or maybe
the odd taller-woman couples are more likely to divorce,
which would produce the same result).
What difference does it make? When people—and here I'm
thinking especially of children—see men and women
together, they form impressions about their relative sizes
and abilities. Because people's current matching process
cuts in half the number of woman-taller pairings, our thinking
is skewed that much more toward assuming men are bigger.
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