Do Women Always Prefer Taller Men?
“Tall, dark, and handsome”: those are the three criteria that women supposedly have for an appealing male physique.
Except we know that Chris Pratt and Ryan Gosling top many women’s lists, so ‘dark’ is clearly negotiable. And plenty of women can put up with a chap who’s been whacked round the head a couple of times with the ugly stick. How else can we explain Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett, or Demi Moore and Bruce Willis (aka the human testicle)?
But tallness. That’s the one. That’s where women draw the line. Size matters. Time after time, research has shown that women dig a lanky feller.
Thing is, most of that research has been run in the West. Women in the UK, Europe, and North America find tall men attractive. So far, scientists have assumed this must be a universal preference. Surely it’s as true of women from Guam to Guadeloupe, and from Japan to Jordan?
Piotr Sorokowski of the University of Wroclaw decided it was time to find out (or that he was due a holiday to Bolivia and Tanzania).
The Hadza are a group of nomadic hunter gathers from Tanzania. They hunt with bow and arrows, they forage for fruits and tubers, and they generally live like all humans lived back in prehistoric times. The Hadza don’t arrange marriages for their children, so relationships are freely entered into and dissolved. Polygamy is uncommon. The men are around 7% taller than the women.
Sorokowski showed Hadza men and women a series of pictures of male/female couples. All the pictures were cartoon line drawings without much detail, and each couple differed only in their relative heights. Sometimes the man was much taller than the woman, and sometimes the woman was slightly taller than the man. The Hadza were asked which height difference they would most prefer in their own relationship, and which pair most resembled them and their actual partner.
The largest group of men (32%) preferred the pair with the greatest difference in stature, where the man was much taller than the woman. A similar 38% of the women preferred the greatest difference too. Some did prefer a smaller difference in height, but the smallest difference was least attractive (the same was true of men).
Also, most of the marriages among the Hadza were between people who reported a large difference in stature between them and their spouse. Taller men did seem to be pairing up with shorter women.
So far so good. The Hadza aren’t much different to the Dutch or the British or the Americans. But what happened when Sorokowski jetted to Bolivia?
Bolivia is the home of the Tsimane, a native Amazonian society of farmer-foragers. Marriages are often arranged by parents. Sorokowski showed the Tsimane the same images he had shown to the Hadza, and asked the same questions: which height difference would you prefer to see between you and your partner?
Now the results were less clear cut. Most men did prefer that they were much taller than their wives, but the effect wasn’t as strong as in the Hadza. Quite a lot of men said they’d be happiest if they were only slightly taller than their wife.
Most surprisingly of all, the women’s most preferred height difference was zero. The highest percentage of women, 23%, said they’d like to be the same height as their husbands. And, unlike in the Hadza, Tsimane height preferences didn’t match up with actual height differences: men who preferred a large height difference didn’t necessarily have a shorter partner; women who wanted no difference didn’t always have a partner of a similar stature.
Sorokowski reckons that the difference between results from the Hadza and the Tsimane may be explained by their marriage patterns. Tsimane women are influenced by their parents when taking a mate, to a much larger degree than are Hadza women. Therefore, they may be suppressing their genuine desire for larger men because they know that their parents don’t rate stature as important. If your parents aren’t going to find you a tall man, then what’s the point getting excited about height. You’d be better off worrying about something you can control.
Sorokowski also makes the point that in cultures where height signifies something vital about a man, women will find taller men more attractive. Taller Tsimane men aren’t seen as more dominant, as men are in other cultures. In the West, taller men are perceived as more dominant, intelligent, and healthy, and they earn more too. It makes sense, then, that Western women like a man who’s tall, dark, and handsome.
Or, at the very least, tall, tall, and tall.
Sorokowski, P., Sorokowska, A., Butovskaya, M., Stulp, G., Huanca, T., & Fink, B. (2015). Body height preferences and actual dimorphism in stature between partners in two non-Western societies (Hadza and Tsimane’). Evolutionary Psychology, 13(2), 455–469. Read summary
For an audio version of this story, see the 25 August 2015 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
