As far as earning more, it appears that size really does matter, or at least it does in Australia, where researchers recently discovered a significant link between a man’s height and his wage.
An extra 5 cm of height is worth about 950 Australian dollars (roughly 760 US dollars) a year, said Australian National University economist Professor Andrew Leigh and Dr Michael Kortt, a public researcher at the University of Sydney.
The researchers found there was no disadvantage as far as income was concerned if you were overweight or obese, but for men especially there was an advantage to being tall. The link between height and wage was also numerically true for women, they found, but it was not statistically significant.
For the study, which has not been published in a journal, as far as we know, the researchers used data from a nationally representative sample of Australian adults.
The results showed that taller people earned more, with the effect being strongest for men, said Leigh.
“For example, the average man in our sample is 5 feet 10 inches tall. Our estimates suggest that if he was 6 feet tall, he would earn another 1.5 per cent, or around $950 per year,” he added.
In other words, the wage gain from another 2 inches (5 cm) of height “is approximately equal to wage gain from one more year of labour market experience,” explained Leigh.
He and Kortt said the link was still strong when they took into account other factors such as age, race, family background, education and experience.
However, the link between height and wage while there numerically, was not as strong for women.
“We found that the effect of height on women’s wages was smaller than for men, and not statistically significant,” said Leigh.
Leigh and Kortt also looked at the link between Body Mass Index (BMI) and earnings. Their representative sample showed that 36 per cent of working Australians were overweight and 22 per cent were obese.
But to their surprise they didn’t find any links between BMI and earnings:
“There seemed to be no wage penalty to being overweight or obese in the Australian labour market,” said Leigh.
This contrasts with findings from other countries like Germany and the US where they found that workers who were more overweight earned less.
As to why the apparent discrepancy, Leigh had two suggestions. Either it was an effect due to to time (their data is more recent), or it was a difference in national attitudes to overweight and obese workers.
“Does Size Matter in Australia?”
Andrew Leigh and Michael Kortt.
Retrieved online from Australian National University website on 20 May 2009.
Additional sources: ANU News.
Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD