Short on height, short on salary
By Douglas Hanks III
Knight Ridder News Service
Feeling shortchanged on salary? It could be because you're short.
Offering a new and much more literal measuring stick for the corporate glass ceiling, a University of Florida study says tall people earn better pay than short people. Each inch, the report said, adds $783 a year to someone's income.
The study, released last week, concluded height matters more than gender in determining income. Tall people best short people on job evaluations and even fare better on seemingly objective measures, such as sales performance.
Researchers say the advantages probably come from an inclination to respect tall people and to view them as successful.
"It's kind of an implicit bias people have," said Timothy Judge, the 6-foot-tall University of Florida business professor who wrote the study with a 6-foot-2 colleague at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Judge began exploring the impact of height on salaries after seeing a news report on a police officer who said she was denied raises for being short. Judge wondered if she had a point. He joined Chapel Hill professor Daniel Cable in analyzing four large surveys in the United States and Britain that tracked thousands of people for years and recorded myriad details from their lives.
In previous research, Judge found tall and short people were equals when it came to intelligence and self-esteem, leaving height as the main culprit in salary gaps. The average height for men in the United States is 5 feet 9 inches; for women, just over 5 feet 3 inches.
Judge found height helped most with jobs requiring social interaction, like sales, but short people also earned less in solitary careers like computer programming.
Part of the unequal treatment may be instinctive. Judge said the earliest humans probably viewed height as an advantage when it came to survival. But today, "I don't think you'll ever find a job description that says an applicant has got to be tall," Judge said. "The fact that it's weighed in an employment situation is kind of troubling."
