“God blessed me with a lot of heart and no height, and I'll take that any day”
Former professional basketball player, Nathaniel Robinson, 5’9’’
One day at Alton Towers theme park, I nearly died. It was completely my own fault too. Those with strong memories might immediately jump to the tragic incident that happened on a ride called The Smiler in June 2015, where 16 people were injured - five seriously - as one of the rollercoaster’s cars hit another, an empty carriage that was stuck on the track. Alton Towers got a £5m fine for that.
That’s not where I was. My ordeal arrived some years earlier. It took place on a different ride, called Air, the unique selling point of which was that you flew face first, lying on your front like a heavily-harnessed superman who was also a paying client of an amusement park.
I did not receive a settlement for the emotional damage caused as I nearly fell out of my restraints that day, as, for the entire duration of my trip on the rollercoaster, I contemplated the very real possibility that I would plummet to my premature death. Chiefly, I would argue that no compensation was due because I had stood on the heels of my trainers in order to cheat my way onto the ride in the first place. For you see, I did not meet the 140cm height requirement to be allowed on. I tricked the attendant into thinking I had passed the threshold, and strongly regretted this decision almost instantly when I realised the harness was a little loose for my taste. In retrospect, it would have been a lot loose for anyone’s taste.
My adult brain knows full well that the good people at Alton Towers would build in contingencies in the event of such stupidity occurring. My child brain did not. Sure enough, such stupidity occurred, and I was convinced I would get my comeuppance. The ghost of me would comment on how unfairly the newspapers would surely have treated poor Alton Towers and its faithful engineers, when the blame lay squarely at my door.
I had a whole world of possibilities to explore that day at the theme park. I could have picked the teacup ride for Christ’s sake, and would arguably have looked less ridiculous than I did as a tiny human rocking around in a belt system clearly designed for adults on the ‘cooler’ alternative.
While I like fast rides, I don’t think I had a craving for that particular roller coaster, Air, over any other. I just wanted to know that I could get on it if I wanted. To feel included. There was something about the height barrier that begged to be overcome. A challenge to be met. I wasn’t going to be excluded from anything just because I happened to be on the small side as a child.
My dad purchased a mug with a photo of us on that ride. It’s still in his kitchen as far as I’m aware. He has no idea that my screaming face is one of terror, not of joy. I was just under 140cm at the time. I am now somewhere in the region of 158cm (score). That doesn’t change the fact I was still an idiot, and occasionally still am. I’m sure when he reads this, my father will keep that mug as a reminder of such. If anything, it will become an even-more treasured possession among his collection.
I’ve grown up a lot since that day. The trouble is, I’ve not, literally speaking, grown up all that much. That 158cm translates to a paltry 5’2’’ for those of us who measure in imperial. For stats fans, I am 2.4 standard deviations away from the average. An online calculator tells me I am in the 0.826th percentile for adult males in the UK; I am shorter than 99.60 per cent of the adult male population, and only 1 in 121 adults will be shorter than me.
In less technical terms: I’m the Little Spoon. The final doll in the Russian Doll. Ronnie Corbett to everyone else’s Ronnie Barker. What I’m trying to say is, I’m pretty damn short.
People often assumed that the same father of mine who bought the Alton Towers mug was in fact my grandad when I was younger, in no small part thanks to my size. They occasionally still do.
Today, at work, in my adult life, I am a journalist, an editor, and, thanks to this work, an author. I’ve done okay for myself. But I am also 5'2'', a fact that I feel defines me nearly as much as any of my professional achievements.
Some wounds have been self-inflicted, like cheating my way onto a roller coaster when I didn't meet the height limit, only to suffer that near-death experience. Others have not. From being prevented from participating in a Go Karting party, to having my favourite pencil case graffitied with short jokes, there's no doubt that my height had a formative impact on my young life through little fault of my own.
My height seemingly continues to pervade every single aspect of my life. Short people are often told to "get over" the fact they are smaller, that it simply doesn’t make a difference to how society perceives them. Yet scientific, empirical, research repeatedly demonstrates taller people are more likely to have better professional, economic, political, social, and romantic prospects.
Height is one of the few factors you can rely on when predicting who will win an election or become chief executive at your company. Who will be offered a job in the first place. Which children will perform better at school. Which man a woman will express an interest in. What physical and mental health state a person is in. Who gets laughed with - or at - during a comedy show. Which athletes succeed in the sporting arena. Who will make friends easiest in life. What everyday obstacles people have to overcome. How physically comfortable they find normal life. How likely they are to suffer serious injury in a car crash. How anxious and vulnerable they are likely to feel around others.
The taller candidate wins presidential elections in America two thirds of the time, significantly more frequently than would be predicted by chance. The bigger the height margin, the greater the chance of winning. More than half of US CEOs stand above 6’ tall, when only 15 per cent of men in the US reach that milestone. A quarter of those business leaders are over 6’2’’, at least six times the proportion in the US population as a whole. The benefit of an extra inch in height is an $800 increase in annual earnings, research has shown.
From a young age, taller children achieve more academically than their shorter peers and make friends easier. In adulthood, controlled studies show that companies are more likely to hire taller people with the same qualifications, and a reduction in an individual’s height increases the negative impression the individual thinks others would hold of them.
When it comes to relationships, the man is taller than the woman in 92.5 per cent of couples - again far more than would be predicted by chance, or expected given the typical height difference between the sexes - and less than 4 per cent of couples are of equal heights.
Being short is not all bad news. Far from it. Having a 6'4'' best friend is simply hilarious to most observers. A man like myself who is only taller than 0.4 per cent of the UK population is hardly likely to be forgotten easily in most social contexts. When employed correctly, mocking my own height can readily elicit humour from pretty much any audience.
But having a few positive tales to tell doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about how we treat short people, given the flood of evidence that shows the gulf in how they are viewed by society compared to their taller peers. This book tells the story of quite how big that gulf is using the latest scientific evidence. Through my personal history and other case studies, I hope yo bring what those numbers mean to life.
Some of you will find my explanation of the science too reductive. That I am just throwing out a few statistics to prove a pre-judged case, and not delivering sufficiently deeply into the mechanics of the studies themselves. Others will find my marshalling of the research tedious in quantity and excessively drawn out in quality.
I hope I have struck the right balance between making the grey world of science accessible and engaging, without losing any of the meaning or accuracy in what the studies themselves do and do not illustrate. But I’m not going to apologise for approaching this work from a journalistic viewpoint, rather than a purely scientific, statistical one, because that’s the job I’ve been doing for over a decade and what I know best. I’m sure there are dozens of academic papers I have missed in the course of my web trawls - I hope you will continue your own more advanced searches should you be interested in any particular issue.
The numbers are not there to bombard you, only to inform. I am not going to be spending thousands of words punching holes in empirical methodologies, because I’m not a professional physiological researcher, and neither are you (unless you are, in which case welcome along for the ride).
But I trust there is enough to show you that using exceptions to prove rules when it comes to height and its impact on life outcomes is a fallacy of the highest order . Such and such a person is short, and they are successful; nothing to see here. I hope that by looking at enough aggregate data I can show that it proves just the opposite rule. You may well think I have cherry picked the numbers to prove my point. There is of course a sense in which I will see things others do not because of my unique experience of the matter at hand. I cannot avoid that as the writer here. But again, I trust the volume and breadth of research marshalled will help weaken the importance of such criticisms when it comes to the robustness of the central thesis: height really does have a major impact across most aspects of our lives.
Some of you will consider my personal anecdotes extremely self indulgent. They are. I have a valid purpose for using them though: to add colour and context to the scientific research. If you feel I have overused them, I can only apologise. They are not there to detract from the science, but to show you what the lived experience is like behind the numbers. To not use them would be to take away a key advantage of me, a short person, writing a book about height - that I can actually provide some insight into what I’m talking about. Ignoring my own experience as a tool to shed further light on the arguments would detract from the work, in my opinion.
At times I’ve tried to be funny. If you don’t think I’ve succeeded, then I’ve not really got much of an excuse. I’m sure I’ve failed more than once to land a quip among the thousands of words that follow. I can at least explain my rationale though. Some of this book can get pretty bleak when you realise quite the trauma some people have gone to gain an extra couple of inches. Or the long-lasting impact of bullying against short children. There is no easy way to talk about people injecting counterfeit growth hormone. Or having to rewrite discrimination laws just for short people to have a shot at getting a job. Or the heightened suicide rates among short groups. I hope adding a few chuckles along the way help soften those blows, while paying due respect to the severity of some of the case studies.
If you think writing an entire book on height and how it is perceived in modern society shows some kind of unhealthy obsession with the subject, I would like to point out that there are a plethora of other individuals who have long exhibited the same fascination with smallness. I’ll happily go toe to toe with the creators of celebheights.com, or the dozens of forums devoted to finding the true height of an online dating match, in a clinical diagnosis of our pathological need to discuss the subject at length.
This work is not a clarion call for some kind of campaign, or a war cry for to establish a Short Persons’ Party. Nor is it intended as a covert whinge about my own position, which I am fully aware is one of relative privilege; I may be short, but I am also hugely fortunate to be a middle-class, white male as well. It is certainly not an appeal to see shortness as a more significant characteristic than any other, or that it is deserving of equivalent protection in law or public discourse.
All I’m saying is, there is a reason all of those websites about celebrity and everyday humans’ height’s exist. We as a culture are fascinated by how far a person’s body stretches upwards. Politicos obsess over whether their candidate gets a box to stand on behind the lectern. Sporting scouts go nuts over hand dimensions. Dating profile users are fascinated by how tall men look in their photos.
Google the name of any famous person and chances are one of the first places the autocorrect takes you to is height. In all likelihood, there will also be content from that celebrity trying to dispel myths about said height, or reports of them trying to keep it a secret. Before you blame them, take a look at the evidence of why they might be compelled to do so. Why people only a fraction away from average height are willing to spend tens of thousands of pounds to literally break and stretch their legs to make up the inches.
It’s because the leap between that being below that average measurement and accusations of short man syndrome isn’t so much of a leap as a pigeon step. A wealth of data supports the notion that, in terms of career earnings potential, romantic suitability, and social standing, revealing yourself to be of short stature is far from advisable. A socioeconomic cycle can continue for decades in a spiral where a short generation tends towards lower professional outcomes, which lead to poorer nutrition and environment in future generations, which then end up shorter themselves.
This could have been the case in the past, you could contend, but no longer applies today. We supposedly live in a world that has moved beyond treating people differently based on how they look. I would also like to argue that this assertion is false; there remain a huge number of examples of how all of these ways we interact differently with someone based on their height have important, real world implications for those people.
I hope what follows goes some way to proving that those differences are not down to mere chance, and deserve far more recognition than they are currently getting.