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/ It turns out, women really care about men's height. I’m 5’9”, if I wanted to be as attractive as somebody who’s 5’10”, right, another inch? I would have to
by markbao 16y ago
/ It turns out, women really care about men's height. I’m 5’9”, if I wanted to be as attractive as somebody who’s 5’10”, right, another inch? I would have to make about $35-40,000 more a year.
From a 5'7": sorry, what!? Link to paper?
- hugh3 16y agoThe fact that women like height and money is uncontroversial (sorry dude). I wouldn't believe any exact numbers about how much of one converts to how much of the other. It could be true in this case though due to the nonlinear utility of money. This guy's a professor of computer science at Duke so he's presumably making good money, maybe $150K? The difference between making $150K and $190K is pretty unimportant, like an extra inch in height, whereas the difference between making $40K and $80K is important, like an extra (I dunno) five inches in height. For this particular guy, he could probably increase his attractiveness by an equal amount by spending fifty bucks on a decent haircut.
- markbao 16y agoHahaha. Oh, yes, I'm aware of that, but the amount he mentioned was strange. But yeah, perhaps he was using a nonlinear comparison as you said, which would make more sense.
- clay 16y agoThis link says 1 inch = $30000. http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/02/height-matters-income-vs-height-trade.html http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/02/height-matters-income-vs...
- hugh3 16y agoHmph, well the study is by Dan Airely, so he's just citing himself. Now I want to plot a graph: "Number of papers written about the effect of height on male attractiveness" vs "height of author"
- aspiringsensei 16y agoThis is an excellent reason why all published works should include a diverse collection of very ephemeral metadata.
- billmcneale 16y ago> This link says 1 inch = $30000. Good to know. Do you have a similar number for tallness?
- jboydyhacker 16y agoWell it says at around 5'9 an inch is worth 30K. Two larger questions arise out of the whole topic? 1. Is the relationship linear? i.e. at 6 vs 5'8, is it 30K per inch, or does the price of the woman start to drop based on your height? 2. If a women's interest is dictated in $$$, what does that imply? Why do men tolerate women who act like this? Why do we raise our daughters to think like this?
- kadavy 16y agoWomen say they want money, which one study found to be true, only to find no correlation between that preference and the men they actually ended up dating: http://www.onlinedatingmatchmaker.com/lie-online-dating-profile/ http://www.onlinedatingmatchmaker.com/lie-online-dating-prof...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Oltmann 16y agoI reckon he is citing this article: What Makes You Click? Mate Preferences and Matching Outcomes in Online Dating http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=895442 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=895442 FTA: "Women, on the other hand, prefer men who are taller than themselves, and they have a particularly strong aversion to shorter men. For example, our estimates imply that compared to a man who is five inches taller than a woman and earns $ 50,000 per year, a man who is five inches shorter than a woman would need to earn slightly more than half a million dollars per year to make up for his shortcoming."
- markbao 16y agoGenetics are serious rubbish. :p Thank you for that, though. It was a fascinating read.
- potatolicious 16y agoAs another 5'7" - fuck :(
- HeyLaughingBoy 16y agoAs yet another 5'7" - great! I revel in the knowledge that there are millions of women who could care less how tall I am (OK, maybe not revel since I married one of the above, but you get my drift). This "women only like tall guys" thing has as much validity as "men only want hot skinny chix with big tits." Sure there's some truth to it, but in the aggregate, people can't be reduced to simplistic statements.
- tomjen3 16y agoI am 5'4. You think you have a problem?
- hugh3 16y agoNotably, all heights are given relative to the woman's height, which is what really matters, not absolute height.
- btmorex 16y agoIt's interesting how everyone is interpreting this data one way. (the startling way) Another way to look at it is height has a certain level of importance and how much money you make almost doesn't matter at all. In other words, it takes so much money to make up for the height difference because almost no one actually cares about the money.