
 
 TV personality Kim Kardashian, right, and her then-fiance, NBA basketball player Kris Humphries, arrive at the Kardashian Kollection launch party on Aug. 17, 2011 in Los Angeles. While Humphries's height may have made him more attractive to her, their marriage did not last. (Matt Sayles/AP) 
 
 There is already a growing body of research suggesting that tall men are generally paid better and are viewed as more masculine and competent. A new paper suggests that their height advantage also spills over into their personal lives. 
 
 “There seems to be an almost universal agreement among men and women that they would prefer to be in a relationship where the man is taller,” said Abigail Weitzman, lead author of the study published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit organization that focuses on how the economy works. 
 
 That leaves short men with a smaller pool of women to date and marry. But it’s not all bad news for them. Their relationships tend to last longer, although that may have more to do with their partners’ choices. 
 
 Shorter guys -- less than 5-foot-7 -- "get divorced at lower rates,” Weitzman noted. “This probably means that women who don't want to be in a relationship with short men are more likely to leave before they get married, rather than after.” 
 
 The study found that tall men -- guys over 6-foot-2 -- marry at higher rates and are more likely to date and wed older, well-educated women. Short men, on the other hand, get married at the lowest rates, and they marry women who are less educated and younger than they are. They also marry women who are closer to their height — or taller. 
 
 The study also examined what happens in the course of these relationships and found --somewhat paradoxically -- that tall men, though they are viewed as more masculine, are more likely to be in egalitarian relationships. They do more housework than shorter men and their income is more likely to be similar to their spouse's. Shorter men have relationships that more closely mirror traditional power dynamics: the man as breadwinner, the woman spending more time on housework. 
 
 “Our findings portray a pattern in which short men compensate for their status disadvantage by enacting other types of stereotypical masculinity,” Weitzman said. 
 
 If tall men have advantages when it comes to desirability, why do they do more housework than shorter men? Weitzman suspects that there could be two explanations. 
 
 “It may just be that housework is less threatening to tall men, that is, if they believe their tallness confers them a certain degree of masculinity,” Weitzman said. On the other hand, short men compensate for the masculinity “perception gap” by displaying other behaviors—such as making more money outside the home and contributing less to housework. 
 
 The other explanation could simply be that the amount of money a man makes relative to his spouse is inversely related to the amount of housework he does. The spouses of short men also tend to be less educated, which could also contribute to that result. ||||| Last year, Ann Friedman called on women everywhere to overthrow “the last acceptable dating prejudice” and give short men a chance. At 6’2”, she can’t restrict her dating pool to taller men, and she’s discovered that short men aren’t—shockingly—that bad: In fact, she writes, if a man is willing to go out with a taller woman, there’s a good chance he’s also secure enough to accept a woman who’s “competitive and outgoing and career-oriented.” 
 
 While Psychology Today kindly offers that women don’t “quite” see short men as “lepers,” Friedman is more accepting than most. When a 5’4” blogger added five inches to his height on his OkCupid profile, his response rate jumped from 16 to 29 percent. In a more methodologically sound experiment, a pair of sociologists found that 48.9 percent of women restricted their online dating searches to men who were taller than them. (Men were less picky: Just 13.5 percent wouldn’t consider a taller woman.) Out of all 925 people, only three left the “desired height” category blank. When the same team took a survey of 181 college students, 29 percent of women said they would feel “awkward” or “weird” dating a shorter guy, and both men and women in this sample were even more exacting about height: More than half of the women—55 percent—said they only wanted to date men who were taller, and 37 percent of men said they would only go out with women who were shorter. 
 
 But a preliminary new study suggests that shorter men might actually make better partners: They do a greater share of housework, earn a greater proportion of household income, and are less likely than their taller peers to get divorced. In a working paper (it has not yet been peer reviewed), Dalton Conley, a sociologist at NYU, and Abigail Weitzman, a Ph.D. candidate, used data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics—a University of Michigan project that’s been collecting demographic data on 5,000 families for almost 50 years—to look at how a man’s height impacts different areas of his relationship after the initial dating period. 
 
 They looked at two sets of data, from 1986 and 2009, and identified 3,033 heterosexual couples. (They restricted their sample to men between the ages of 23 and 45 cohabiting with a woman.) The men ranged in height from 4’6” to 7 feet; their height, in relation to their partners', ranged from nine inches shorter to two feet taller. They categorized the men into three groups: “Short” men were defined as 5’6” or less in 1986, 5’7” or below in 2009; “tall” men were at least 6’1” in 1986 and 6’2” in 2009. ||||| From Assortative to Ashortative Coupling: Men's Height, Height Heterogamy, and Relationship Dynamics in the United States 
 
 NBER Working Paper No. 20402 
 
 Issued in August 2014 
 
 NBER Program(s):Health Economics, Labor Studies 
 
 
 
 Studies of online dating suggest that physical attraction is a key factor in early relationship formation, but say little about the role of attractiveness in longer-term relationships. Meanwhile, assortative coupling and exchange models widely employed in demographic research overlook the powerful sorting function of initial and sustained physical attraction. This article observes the effects of one physical characteristic of men--height--on various relationship outcomes in longer-term relationships, including spouses' attributes, marriage entry and stability, and the division of household labor. Drawing on two different cohorts from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the authors show that (1) height-coupling norms have changed little over the last three decades, (2) short, average, and tall men's spouses are qualitatively different from one another (3) short men marry and divorce at lower rates than others and (4) both men's height relative to other men and their height relative to their spouse are related to the within-couple distribution of household labor and earnings. These findings depict an enduring height hierarchy among men on in the spousal marriage market. Further, they indicate that at least one physical characteristic commonly associated with physical attraction influences the formation, functioning, and stability of longer-term relationships. 
 
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 Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w20402 
 
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– The short guy doesn't always get the girl, but when he does, he usually gets to keep her. So says a new study in the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found that short guys, defined as those shorter than 5-foot-7, are about 18% less likely to marry than their taller counterparts, but when they do, they divorce at lower rates—to the tune of 32% lower, reports the New Republic. Divorce rates for tall and average guys, meanwhile, are basically the same. "This probably means that women who don't want to be in a relationship with short men are more likely to leave before they get married, rather than after," one researcher tells the Washington Post. Or more simply: "There’s something distinct about the women who marry short men." But it's not quite clear what's distinct, because shorter men appear to be the heavyweights in the relationship: Their partners tend to be younger, less educated women, who earn less than they do. Some 78% of short men out-earn their partners, as opposed to 69% of average and 71% of tall men. (More egalitarian marriages, meanwhile, often involve less sex.)