A 2022 cross-cultural survey found that women, on average, stated a preference for men about 2.3cm (roughly 1 inch) taller than their own country’s average male height. Men, on average, stated a preference for women about 2.5cm (roughly 1 inch) shorter than their own country’s average female height. This pattern held across four countries, but it’s an average stated preference across a sample, not a rule. Most real couples don’t match it.
Height preference is a well-studied topic in relationship research, partly because it’s easy to measure and survey directly, unlike harder-to-quantify traits. That makes it a useful lens on stated dating preferences in general. As this article covers below, stated preference and real couples’ actual heights are two different things.
The survey’s key figures
| Group | Stated preference, on average | Compared to their own country’s average |
|---|---|---|
| Women (sample average) | Prefer a male partner ~2.3cm taller | Above the average male height in their own country |
| Men (sample average) | Prefer a female partner ~2.5cm shorter | Below the average female height in their own country |
| Pattern across countries | The “male-taller norm” | Held in all four countries surveyed |
| Name | Height |
|---|---|
| Illustrative man (180.5cm) | 180.5 cm |
| Illustrative woman (161.4cm) | 161.4 cm |
What the study actually found
The figures above come from Pisanski and colleagues’ 2022 paper in Frontiers in Psychology. It surveyed 536 people (333 women, 203 men) aged 15 to 77, drawn from Canada, Cuba, Norway and the United States. Participants stated their preferred partner height. The researchers then compared that with the average height of their own sex in their own country.
The result was a consistent gap in one direction. Across all four countries, women’s average stated preference sat above their country’s male average, and men’s average stated preference sat below their country’s female average. The researchers describe this as a male-taller norm, since it appeared regardless of which country a participant was from.
A secondary finding adds some nuance. Taller men showed a preference for relatively shorter women, specifically in short-term relationship contexts compared with long-term ones. That shift wasn’t observed in women’s stated preferences, which stayed broadly consistent regardless of relationship context.
It’s worth being clear about the sample, too. Cuba, Canada, Norway and the United States aren’t a globally representative set of countries. An age range of 15 to 77 also spans multiple generations, who may hold different attitudes. The consistency across four fairly different countries is a notable finding, but it’s still a finding from this one sample, not a universal law.
A worked example using UK averages
This site’s own dataset gives the UK average adult height as 178.21cm for men and 163.94cm for women. Applying the study’s average preference shifts to those figures is a simple way to picture the pattern. It’s this site’s own calculation, not something the study itself published for the UK specifically.
Women’s average-preferred male height: 178.21cm + 2.3cm ≈ 180.5cm. Men’s average-preferred female height: 163.94cm − 2.5cm ≈ 161.4cm. Put those two illustrative figures side by side, as in the board above, and the gap between them comes to roughly 19cm (about 7.5 inches).
That 19cm figure is worth treating carefully. It’s built by combining two separate average preferences from two separate groups of survey respondents. It isn’t a measurement of any actual couple, and it isn’t a target for one either.
It’s also worth noting what this calculation doesn’t do. It doesn’t predict who any specific person will end up with. It says nothing about whether a couple with a 19cm gap, or any other gap, will be well matched in other respects. It simply shows, in concrete centimetres, what two separate average preferences look like side by side.
What different height gaps look like
To make the abstract idea of a “gap” more concrete, here’s the same UK average woman (163.94cm) paired with a range of illustrative male partner heights. This is purely to show what each gap looks like in practice. None of these is presented as better or more correct than another.
| Height gap | Illustrative male partner height | Female partner height (UK average) |
|---|---|---|
| 0cm | 163.9cm | 163.9cm |
| 5cm | 168.9cm | 163.9cm |
| 10cm | 173.9cm | 163.9cm |
| 19cm (this article’s worked example) | 182.9cm | 163.9cm |
| 30cm | 193.9cm | 163.9cm |
Real couples span this entire range and beyond it, in both directions. A 0cm gap, a 30cm gap, and a woman taller than her partner are all common in practice. That’s true whatever any survey’s stated average preference happens to be.
You can build any of these pairings yourself on the comparison board, or a woman-taller pairing the table above doesn’t show. Enter two heights and see the gap between them directly, rather than relying on a table of fixed examples.
Preference isn’t the same as reality
It’s worth separating two different things clearly. The study measured what surveyed people said they’d prefer, on average, in the abstract. It didn’t measure the actual height gaps of real couples, and it said nothing about relationship satisfaction or outcomes.
Stated average preferences also blur a lot of individual variation. Some women in the sample preferred shorter men; some men preferred taller women. An average shift of 2.3cm or 2.5cm describes the centre of a spread, not a fixed rule that every respondent, or every real couple, follows.
Stated preference and real-world partner choice can also diverge in practice. Dating and marriage involve trade-offs, availability and chance that a preference survey can’t capture. A person might state a preference for a taller partner and still happily pair with someone shorter, for reasons a height survey was never designed to measure.
Most real-world couples don’t match the population-average preference pattern at all. Height is one factor among many that people weigh when choosing a partner. Plenty of long, happy relationships have a much smaller gap, a much larger one, or the woman taller than the man.
Method and sources
The core figures — the 2.3cm and 2.5cm average preference shifts, the four countries, the 536-person sample, and the short-term/long-term context finding — come directly from Pisanski et al.’s 2022 paper in Frontiers in Psychology, cited below and also listed on PubMed.
The 180.5cm, 161.4cm and roughly 19cm figures are this site’s own illustrative calculation. It applies the study’s stated centimetre shifts to this site’s UK average adult heights (178.21cm men, 163.94cm women), themselves drawn from the NCD-RisC dataset cited below. The 0-30cm scenario table above uses the same UK average female figure with illustrative male heights, purely to visualise what different gaps look like.
Rounding is applied only for display. 178.21 + 2.3 = 180.51cm, shown as 180.5cm; 163.94 − 2.5 = 161.44cm, shown as 161.4cm; the difference between them is 19.07cm, shown as roughly 19cm. Nothing here is smoothed or adjusted beyond straightforward arithmetic on the two source figures.
This article describes survey data. It isn’t advice about who anyone should date. No height gap shown here should be read as more “correct” than any other.
As with any single study, treat these figures as one data point rather than a settled fact about human preference. Further research across more countries and age groups would be needed to say how far the male-taller norm generalises beyond the four countries Pisanski et al. surveyed.
See a height gap on the comparison board with your own numbers, or try the country average height tool to check averages for a different country.