Last year, Ann Friedman\u00a0called on\u00a0women everywhere to overthrow \u201cthe last acceptable dating prejudice\u201d and give short men a chance. At 6\u20192\u201d, she can\u2019t restrict her dating pool to taller men, and she\u2019s discovered that short men aren\u2019t\u2014shockingly\u2014that bad: In fact, she writes, if a man is willing to go out with a taller woman, there\u2019s a good chance he\u2019s also secure enough to accept a woman who\u2019s \u201ccompetitive and outgoing and career-oriented.\u201d<\/p>\n
While\u00a0Psychology Today\u00a0kindly offers that women don\u2019t \u201cquite\u201d see short men as \u201clepers,\u201d Friedman is more accepting than most. When a\u00a05\u20194\u201d blogger\u00a0added five inches to his height on his OkCupid profile, his response rate jumped from 16 to 29 percent. In\u00a0a more methodologically sound experiment, a pair of sociologists found that 48.9 percent of women restricted their online dating searches to men who were taller than them. (Men were less picky: Just 13.5 percent wouldn\u2019t consider a taller woman.)<\/p>\n
Out of all 925 people, only three left the \u201cdesired height\u201d category blank. When the same team took a survey of 181 college students, 29 percent of women said they would feel \u201cawkward\u201d or \u201cweird\u201d dating a shorter guy, and both men and women in this sample were even more exacting about height: More than half of the women\u201455 percent\u2014said they only wanted to date men who were taller, and 37 percent of men said they would only go out with women who were shorter.<\/p>\n
But a preliminary new study suggests that shorter men might actually make better partners: They do a greater share of housework, earn a greater proportion of household income, and are less likely than their taller peers to get divorced. In a working paper (it has not yet been peer reviewed),\u00a0Dalton Conley, a sociologist at NYU, and Abigail Weitzman, a Ph.D. candidate, used data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics\u2014a University of Michigan project that\u2019s been collecting demographic data on 5,000 families for almost 50 years\u2014to look at how a man\u2019s height impacts different areas of his relationship after the initial dating period.<\/p>\n
They looked at two sets of data, from 1986 and 2009, and identified 3,033 heterosexual couples. (They restricted their sample to men between the ages of 23 and 45 cohabiting with a woman.) The men ranged in height from 4\u20196\u201d to 7 feet; their height, in relation to their partners’, ranged from nine inches shorter to two feet taller. They categorized the men into three groups: \u201cShort\u201d men were defined as 5\u20196\u201d or less in 1986, 5\u20197\u201d or below in 2009; \u201ctall\u201d men were at least 6\u20191\u201d in 1986 and 6\u20192\u201d in 2009.<\/p>\n
Short men turned out to be somewhat less likely to get married: At every age before 45, they marry at a rate 18 percent lower than men of average height. \u201cShort men may have a harder time getting married because they\u2019re viewed as less masculine,\u201d says Weitzman. \u201cWomen who have traditional gender ideals may find that less desirable.\u201d If they do find a partner, though, they\u2019re less likely to get divorced: Divorce rates for tall and average men were basically indistinguishable, but 32 percent lower for short men. Weitzman explains this by saying that women who are \u201cresistant\u201d to marrying short men are more likely to \u201copt out\u201d before it gets to the point of marriage: \u201cThere\u2019s something distinct about the women who marry short men.\u201d<\/p>\n
Or maybe it\u2019s just that short men make better partners. They do a greater share of housework: On average, they perform 8 hours and 28 minutes per week of housework\u2014constituting about 28 percent of the total\u2014compared to 7 hours 38 minutes for average men and 7 hours 30 minutes for tall men. And they\u2019re more likely to be the breadwinners: Conley and Weitzman estimate that 78 percent of short men out-earn their partners, compared to 69 percent of average men and 71 percent of tall men.<\/p>\n
Although other research has suggested that taller men earn more\u2014perhaps because of employers\u2019 biases\u2014they didn\u2019t find evidence of income disparity among the different height groups. Tall men may be, in Weitzman\u2019s words, \u201caware of the status that is conferred by their tallness\u201d\u2014which might make them less motivated to pitch in at home.<\/p>\n
Short men are more likely to partner with women who are older and less educated. 21 percent of the short men in the sample coupled with women who had not completed high school, compared with 16 percent of average men and just 12 percent of tall men: Overall, short men are 75 percent more likely to couple with someone who hasn\u2019t graduated from high school. Across the whole sample, only 9 percent of men partnered with a woman who was more than three years older, but these men were likely to come from the short cohort.<\/p>\n
\u201cShort men may be considered immature, and one way they could get around this threat to their masculinity would be by partnering with women who are younger than them,\u201d said Weitzman. \u201cTall men don’t necessarily have that same threat and may feel more comfortable partnering with women who are older than them.\u201d That doesn\u2019t sound so far from Friedman\u2019s argument.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: New Republic<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last year, Ann Friedman\u00a0called on\u00a0women everywhere to overthrow \u201cthe last acceptable dating prejudice\u201d and give short men a chance. At 6\u20192\u201d, she can\u2019t restrict her dating pool to taller men, and she\u2019s discovered that short men aren\u2019t\u2014shockingly\u2014that bad: In fact, she writes, if a man is willing to go out with a taller woman, there\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1565,354],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n