The long and the short of it: We prefer tall people to short ones

Listening to an oldies station while driving around town the other day, a catchy tune by Randy Newman, called ``Short People,'' was on the radio. It first came out in 1978, and I remember that it caused both great hilarity and great anger at the time, depending on whether one was short or tall and amused or offended by the lyrics.

They certainly went against all political correctness by claiming: ``Short people got no reason to live/ They got little hands/ And little eyes.../ They got little noses/ And tiny little teeth/ They wear platform shoes/ On their nasty little feet...'' Ugly as the ditty may have been, it expressed the widespread notion that height is important and that a man measuring 6' in height has it over the shorter fellow every time.

The average height for an American male these days is 5 feet 9 inches. I stand 5 foot 7 inches in my stocking feet and am therefore on the short side but not particularly bothered by it. I look admittedly puny in a group photo with the basketball team, but then, who doesn't? I remember that I once stepped on a footstool for a photo with Tom Haas, now the president of Grand Valley State University and once my American Council on Education fellow here at Western Michigan University. Tom towered over me. The photo, meant to show us as men of equal standing, unfortunately shows the foot stool and thus makes the attempted deception immediately obvious.

Many short men attempt to correct nature's neglect by adding an inch to their height by wearing elevator shoes or sporting elaborate hairdos like North Korea's Kim Yong-il who is said to be only 5 feet 6 inches. What good does it do a short person to know that Josef Stalin was 5 feet 5 inches, or that neither Andrew Carnegie, Toulouse-Lautrec, Milton Friedman, Immanuel Kant, Mother Teresa, Mae West or Alexander Pope ever grew higher than 5 feet?

Even among famous movie stars, we find short people such as Dustin Hoffman, Charlie Chaplin, Richard Dreyfuss, Michael Fox, and Joel Grey (all 5 feet 5 inches), although the height of Tom Cruise is a widely debated secret. However, when Nicole Kidman divorced him, she nastily remarked that finally she could wear high heels again. When Alan Ladd (5 feet 4 inches) played opposite Sophia Loren (5 feet 8 inches) in the movie ``Boy on a Dolphin''', the Italian actress had to stand in a hole for the scenes in which they kissed, and Princess Di (5 feet 10 inches) always wore flat shoes when she appeared in public with Prince Charles (5 feet 11 inches).

NOSSA, the National Organization of Short Statured Adults, fights prejudice and discrimination against short people. It points out interesting facts. The average fashion model, for instance, is 5 feet 11 inches and weighs 117 pounds. The average American woman is 5 feet 4 inches and weighs 140 pounds. Since our popular culture takes its cue from fashion and movies, many women think that they are too short and too fat.

But it seems that men are particularly concerned about height. A study reveals that in U.S. presidential elections from 1904 to 1984, the taller candidate won 80 percent of the time, presumably because voters think that bigger is better.

A survey of businesses conducted by the University of Florida in 2003 shows that there is a positive relationship between height and starting salary among all newly hired MBAs. The study further claimed that each extra inch of a man's height corresponded to an additional $789 in annual salary. All other things being equal, the taller of two candidates will be hired 72 percent of the time. Half of all Fortune 500 corporate CEOs are taller than 6 feet while only 10 percent of all American males are at that height.

In 2005, Michigan was the only state in the union that forbade discrimination on the basis of height. But females who dated men largely disregarded this fact. When 100 women were asked to judge photographs of men whom they believed to be tall, average, or short, all of them found the tall and average men more attractive.

The great Harvard economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, knew that it is hard to change human nature when it comes to natural preferences. He wrote: ``The bias towards tallness and against shortness is one of society's most blatant and most forgivable prejudices.'' John Kenneth Galbraith was 6'6''.

Diether H. Haenicke is president emeritus of Western Michigan University. Letters may be sent to him at Western Michigan University, 3019 Waldo Library, Kalamazoo, MI 49008. His e-mail address is

diether.haenicke@wmich.edu.