A recent tweet by a New York Times reporter posted a link to Modeling Interracial Love, a report about a recent Center for Economic and Policy Research discussion paper excitingly titled Anthropometry of Love: Height and Gender Asymmetries in Interethnic Marriages (.pdf):
“We argue that a simple preference for a taller husband (or shorter wife) can explain part of the gender-specific… asymmetries across ethnic groups in the propensity to outmarry. Blacks are taller than Asians, and their height distribution is closer to whites. Because they are taller, black men have better prospects on the white marriage market than Asian men. For women, the reverse is true. Because Asians are relatively short on average, women fare substantially better on the white marriage market than black women.”
Their findings are primarily based on British data, but also consider American marriage data and patterns; economists and sociologists try to model interracial dating based on such factors as education and socioeconomic status in order to explain interracial marriage imbalances between men and women of the same ethnicity, without much luck.
Most would agree that men prefer women who are shorter than themselves and women prefer men who are taller than themselves, but to say that height alone is the sole determining primary factor for interracial marriage imbalances between men and women is simplistic — I’d like to think that humans are more evolved than our predecessors. That said, studies exist in regards to height and their relationship to management material.
