Interestingly if you account for height discrimination, it causes women to be over-represented in management roles, implying that what's normally ascribed to sex discrimination is really height discrimination and the sex discrimination, if anything, goes the other way. A 5'6" man is less likely to be in management than a 5'6" woman.
It also implies that if we solved height discrimination there would be a lot more female CEOs.
> Maybe a better way to put it, an 'average height female is more likely to be in management than a below-average height male'.
Average adult female height in the US is 5’4”, so 5’6” is noticeably above average, almost as much as it is below average for an adult male (average 5’6”.)
The average is probably even higher if you restrict your data to those who would even be eligible for CEO level positions (higher educated, coming from wealthy families, etc).
I think 5ft 9in would be on the short end of the men I know, especially white collar professionals.
US male adult average height is 5'9" per CDC, for females it's 5'3.6”. hence my statement that 5'6 is nearly as much above average for an adult female in the US as it is below average for a male.
Correct in what sense? Both statements are borne out by the evidence. You are each choosing to select different representations of those facts as the most salient.
One is more correct than they other, and it's borne out by the evidence here, and the evidence of your own daily observations. If you work in a large office, or a few of them for comparison, there's ample data in your own experience to see it if you care to observe specifically.
The issue is not crudely height, it's height relative to gender and it's actually pretty straight forward.
A 5 foot 6 woman is not going to be hugely punished for her height, whereas a 5 foot 6 man will definitely be.
> A 5 foot 6 woman is not going to be hugely punished for her height, whereas a 5 foot 6 man will definitely be.
Isn't that in itself gender discrimination?
We know that on average Asian men are shorter than black men. If someone made the same compensation for the difference, what would you call it?
We've just had a Supreme Court decision saying employers can't discriminate against trans employees. If the same 5'6" employee gets a promotion by presenting as female that they don't get by presenting as male, what does that imply there?
5'6" is the average height in the US, so they're both of average height. Someone engaged in height discrimination and not sex discrimination is, by definition, looking at their height and not their sex.
Unless they are actually doing it consciously and fastidiously, by actually measuring, height discrimination is probably done by subjective perception of being tall, which is probably subconsciously “tuned” to apply gender-specific standards.
You would have to look into the motivations behind it. From an evolutionary perspective you might expect people to consider it riskier to have a leader they expect to lose a physical confrontation to a competitor, in which case there would be no reason to expect an adjustment for gender.
If I was to make a WAG as to why height discrimination seems to affect women less, consider footwear. 3" heels close half the perceived height gap between men and women on average -- not all of it, but enough to confer an advantage at the same original height.
That doesn't mean that a woman at height X is more likely to be a CEO than a man at height X, which was the original claim.
That's simultaneously a very interesting and somewhat plausible claim, which is why I'd love it if someone did an actual analysis of it.
Is there a public dataset available of S&P 500 CEOs of the past two decades, tagged with height and gender? I might take a stab at a simple analysis myself if there is.
> That doesn't mean that a woman at height X is more likely to be a CEO than a man at height X, which was the original claim.
It basically does.
Suppose the average height for a female CEO is also 6'. (I can't find the actual number anywhere, Google seems to be useless for this sort of thing these days.) In that case women ~6' are over-represented as CEOs, even more than the men of the same height, QED.
Suppose it's less than that, e.g. 5'9". In that case women ~5'9" are over-represented, or less under-represented, as CEOs compared to men of the same height, otherwise the overall average wouldn't be 6'.
Having more data would tell you some interesting things like whether and to what extent it's true at any given height, but it implies that it's true for at least some heights and possibly all of them.
I also wonder if the WFH revolution will reduce the advantage a tall, handsome guy has over a more productive, short guy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_discrimination