CONVENTIONAL wisdom has it that taller men make more money, get more dates and are more likely to win a presidential election. Shorter women aren't taken seriously, and boys and girls both suffer psychologically well into adulthood if they've grown up the shortest in their class. Right?
Well, maybe ... or maybe not. What people thought they knew about the height advantage doesn't always hold up to the cold eye of psychological and sociological research. Experts are digging deeper into data on the consequences of shortness, and though recent studies validate some of society's long-held assumptions about height, others are getting chipped away -- even dismissed.
"There is little or no evidence that making short people taller changes their lives in any meaningful way," says Dr. Norman Fost, professor of pediatrics and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin Medical School.
The reality of the relative advantages of being tall is increasingly important because in 2003 the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of synthetic growth hormone for kids with idiopathic short stature, or shortness for no apparent medical reason.
The treatment, an injection every day for many years, is expensive and not consistently covered by insurers. The average benefits -- an increase of about 2 inches in height -- are modest. Although no one expects ill health consequences down the road, no one really knows for sure what might happen. And critics say all this risk and expense is aimed at altering healthy children who are objects of social prejudice, rather than attacking the prejudice itself.
There's little doubt that short kids get teased, even occasionally ridiculed. But most grow up to do just as well as their taller taunters. Take the common perception that employers discriminate against short men in hiring and income. That isn't exactly what happens. It turns out the much-touted income advantage of height is more closely linked to high school experiences than to hiring practices in the adult workplace. And when brothers are studied, one tall and one short, the two have exactly the same employment opportunities and income, regardless of height.
"There's still a widespread perception that male success is measured in stature," says Dalton C. Conley, chairman of the sociology department at New York University. "But in terms of total income, earnings and occupational outcomes, the male height issue is really a red herring."
