Cohen: Why it's so rare for a wife to be taller than her husband
In an editorial in the Atlantic by MPRC Faculty Associate Philip Cohen tries to explain the reasons why couples comprising taller wives and shorter husbands are so rare. The average height difference between men and women in the U.S is about 6 inches. With the norm being that most men on average are taller than women. Couples in which the reverse is true may be perceived as a problem of gender performance: In straight couples short men might not be perceived as real men and tall women as real women as they together do not display the normal pattern. Cohen also analyzed the height of 4,600 married couples from the 2009 Panel Study of Income Dynamics and found that the average husband's height was 5'11"in while the average wife was 5'5". Moreover, he found that only 3.8 percent of the couples were made up of a tall wife and a short husband despite the availability of such a match up in a large number of cases.
Fiona Macrae and Damien Gayle of the Daily Mail picked up this story and compared it to similar research on couples in the U.K, where they found that for most couples - 92.5 percent - the man was taller. Macrae and Gayle also report that despite these findings, women do not like their men too tall, which shows that the extremes of height whether too tall or too short generally have less choices in the marriage market.
Cohen concludess : "What difference does it make? When people—and here I'm thinking especially of children—see men and women together, they form impressions about their relative sizes and abilities. Because people's current matching process cuts in half the number of woman-taller pairings, our thinking is skewed that much more toward assuming men are bigger."