Let me just start off by saying this post isn’t going to be filled with earth shattering paradigm shifting ideas. It’s not. What this blog IS going to be is stating the obvious, BUT it’s going to be stating the obvious and backing it up with statistical data. So here it is, I hope you’re sitting down:
Women prefer to date taller men
I know right. Did I just BLOW YOUR MIND? Or naaah? I mean I know this isn’t anything we don’t already know, but I wanted to figure out exactly how true this actually is. I actually kind of had an aha moment when I was talking to one of my female friends and she was telling me about her date last week and she said it went fine “but he was kind of short”. And so in my head, I’m doing the math and I’m thinking, well she’s about 5’4 or 5’5, so short to her must be like my height, which is 5’7 to 5’8, right? RIGHT!? No, her short was he was only 5’10. FUCK.MY.LIFE. And so, whatever, whatever, her preference of height is her preference of height, that fine. And my goal is to not change or shame women for having height their preferences. Not at all. I mean people like what they like. Whether it’s because they want to wear heels and not be taller than them, or because they want a tall guy that can fight off ninjas. Their preference is their preference. BUT I did want to find out if she was of the norm of what women’s height preferences were, at least according to their match.com profiles.
So what I did was I canceled all my dates that I had for 3 days in a row so that I could sit at home and go through 600 plus different match.com profiles data mining for height preferences information. Thankfully I haven’t had a date in weeks, so I didn’t have to cancel any dates.
Data Collection Approach:
– Age 26 to 32
– Height 5’1 to 5’9
– 30 miles radius of 92103
– For each age and height I took 10 data samples. (i.e. 10 women who are 5’1 and 26 years old, 10 women who are 5’1 and 27 years old…etc.)
– Search results were sorted based on last log in, and NOT the “match picks”, assuring a better random selection
– The first 10 profiles were the selected data points (someone asked if I only picked the “pretty girls”)
– WARNING MATH STUFF: I used median vs the mean (arithmetic average) because it’s better suited for skewed distributions (like 5’2 women who want to date 6’6 guys) to derive a central tendency.
– WARNING MATH STUFF: For the “Male’s height determines their dating pool” section, I ONLY took females that were equal to the man’s height or less for the calculations. Because it’s not fair to calculate the preferences for a woman that 5’8 with a man that is only 5’5. His dating “pool” is women 5’5 and shorter. Don’t worry, the numbers still suck for a guy 5’5 anyway you slice it. At least this way he has a fighting chance.
I wanted to find out:
-Do women want a guy that is 3-4 inches taller than them, OR do all women regardless of their height want a guy that is “tall” (5’11)? For example if a woman is 5’2 would she date a guy that is 5’6 and above because he is 4 inches taller than her? Or does that 5’2 woman, on average, still want to date the guy that is “tall”?
-Of my dating pool of women that are between 26 and 32 years of age and between 5’1 to 5’9, how many of them actually consider my height as their minimum height preference. Basically what percentage of women I would date, would want to date me.
-What is the breakdown, based on women’s height that said they would date me?
For example, I imagine that of the women who are 5’1, I probably match with a higher percentage of them, vs. women that are 5’7 that said they would date me.
IMPORTANT – READ THIS DISCLAIMER CLOWNS:
Look, I know, that when women fill out online dating profiles, they put their “ideals”, and in real life actually do date lower than their minimum height preference. I know, thank you for being the 27th person to mention that to me. BUT until match.com adds the “Here is the actual height of guy I would date” field, this is ONLY DATA I HAVE TO GO ON.
Here we go:
So, what did we learn?
Her Height vs His Height
You can see that as the woman gets taller the height difference in their preference decreases. So it starts at a difference of 6.5 inches with women who are 5’1 wanting to date guys that are 5’7 and half or taller, but women who are 5’9, only prefer a minimum height 2 inches taller than them, at 5’11.
Males Height Determines Their Dating Pool – Women Like Tall Men
DUH. But, basically if you are man that is 5’5 and under, you should take your $24.99 dollars a month and light it on fire. Because you are more likely to attract a women when you are lighting money on fire than the bleak percentages of women that want to date you. It’s actually pretty grim until you’re a guy that is 5’10 or taller.
When I made this infographic earlier this week, I thought I was 5’7,I actually got measured today during a bio metric screening for work and it turns out I’m actually just OVER 5’7, which means I’m basically 5’8 with shoes. Right? RIGHT GUYS!? But for assumptions of this data let’s pretend I’m straight up 5’7. This means only 32% of the women said I match their minimum height criteria. So even though I am as tall or taller than %100 percent of the women in my dating pool (5’7 and below), only %32 percent said I was in THEIR dating pool. Think about that.
Which heights of women actually want to match with me?
You can see that my real sweet spot is women that are 5’1 and 5’2, with 50% and 44% matching with my height of 5’7. Apparently only 11% of women who are my height said they would date a guy their own height.
Ok, awesome, whatever, I WAS ALL EXCITED TO GET ME A 5’1 SOUL MATE! So I went to match.com, and searched for 5’1 women who are between the ages of 26 and 32. So even though 50% of them said they would date my height, there is not very many of them. Like at all. There were only 70 profiles that were active in the last 2 weeks. So REALLY that only leaves about 35 women between the age of 26-32 that are 5’1 that would actually date me. 35 is not a lot. Yes 35 is more than 0. But barely. That’s probably a whole other infographic I could make of what is the actual size (population) of my dating pool and not percentages.
What else did I discover?
I learned that age didn’t matter. Meaning that all 26 year olds had a median height of about 5’9 for their minimum height, and so did 27 year olds and so did every age group.
I might be an awful human for doing this:
I also discovered something interesting….and I know this is going to sound awful coming out of my mouth, but that’s only because it is. So, I also collected another data point…..I recorded each woman’s relative attractiveness. I KNOW I KNOW, I’m an awful person. BUT I wanted to know (and had to know) if people that “weren’t as attractive” had a shorter height preference. Yes, beauty is subjective, so this won’t be as scientific but I tried to be as fair with the rating as possible. It was a 1 to 10 scale with no woman getting below a 4 and no woman getting a 10. And I tried to do a relative attractiveness scale, in that is she attractive to the masses. Because my idea of attractive is different than yours, but in general, I think society kind of has a norm of attractive. Let me say, that every woman is beautiful to someone, and now let me say I’m an awful person because I rated women, but it was for science. BUT I did discover a consistent trend, that woman who were rated below average attractiveness (less than 7), did have a significantly lower median of height preference. At least .5 inches and all the way up to 1.5 inches, which is significant considering the low variance of medians of the whole population. So yes, less attractive women have a lower minimum height preference. I’m not going to speculate or commentary on why that may be, but, statistically speaking, it’s a fact.
I’m sorry I rated women subjectively, but the data shows a statistically trend. Yes, it’s wrong I did it, but math proved it true. I decided not to post the data specifically of those results, as I’m already going to get yelled at for just mentioning it.
What’s the take away:
Believe it or not this isn’t my “WHAAAAAAA, WHAAAAA, I’m only 5’8 and girls don’t want to date me, whaaaa, whaaaa” post. This was just a statistical presentation of data from match.com of women’s ideal preferences. I will probably use this data to make the decision to stop doing online dating. Because only 33% percent of my dating pool on this medium actually wants to date me. And you’re probably saying “33% is a still a third Steven, that’s a lot”. First of all it’s fucking rude to talk when I’m talking, I was in the middle of something and you just kind of interrupted, what I was saying was, in a hyper competitive market place like match.com women are given choice. Each day women are bombarded with messages from different guys, giving them choice. And now given the choice, wouldn’t you choose your preferred ideal? For example, you love pizza, like fucking love to eat pizza. And every day you get the option to eat bagels, burritos or pizza. Now, even though you like bagels and burritos, and you’ll eat them no problem, you fucking love pizza. So given the choice, you always pick pizza. I forget what I was saying, but basically pizza is pretty good.
I’ll close with, I don’t have a short man complex, at least I don’t think I do? I’ve dated women taller, and have no problem with it. I’m confident in my ability to find my person, I just don’t think match.com is the place to do it, statistically speaking. I’m not going to get any taller, which is why I developed over woman attracting qualities, like being funny, being outgoing, being a gentleman, being involved with the community (I’ve been president of 2 different non-profit organizations, and I’ve coached a Special Olympics basketball for the last 7 years), I’m one of the best dancers you’ve ever met, being educated (masters degree) having a great career, and being able to brag about myself in my own blog. So don’t reach out to me to pity party me. Only reach out to me if you’d like to date me. I’m just kidding. No, I’m not.
P.S. On a side note, I think I love data. I think I need a career where I can mine through data, find patterns, do analysis and tell a story with data visualization. FIND ME A JOB WHERE I CAN DO THAT. K, thanks.
Steve
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