Dismantle Height Supremacy

Ladies, your dating filters are keeping you single.

I have a confession. I’m not 6ft.

But I’ll tell you something, on every single dating app I was on in my single days, that stat went straight to 6ft. 6’1 if I was planning on wearing those boots with the chunky heel on the first date.

Why? Why would I indulge in this little charade? Because I had to goddammit. And you made me.

‘Oh that’s silly Ben, women will like you for who you are’, people would say. Wrong.

In one app, over 90% of women have their dating app filter set to 6ft or above. 90% of women. You’re being filtered out before you have any chance of shooting your shot. You’re not even given the chance to show women you’re probably a shitty person.

Now look, even though my dating days are behind me now, the height bias remains. So here comes Dating Doctor Ben with one piece of advice: turn off your height filter.

Only 14.5% of men are above 6ft. That’s 90% of the women competing for 14.5% of men. Even taller, your pool of men becomes smaller. Only 3.9% of the population are 6’2 or taller. It doesn’t take a mathematical savant to figure out why you’re single if your filters are set to dizzying heights. And that’s before you add any other preference, filter, or type.

Women are naturally hypergamous (word-of-the-day-calendar-klaxon). Put simply, hypergamy is the desire to ‘marry up’ – and this is usually across a range of characteristics, height included.

Even in our era of (relative) female emancipation, studies show women will still want a man who is older, at least as equally educated, and earns more. This is still true even as women out-educate men, (14% more women graduate university than men) women out-earn men in their ‘peak’ dating years (a woman in her 20s will typically earn £1,111 more per annum than her male counterparts), and as women are getting better looking (apparently). So as well as all that, women want their man to be 6ft too? Again, no wonder you haven’t been on a date in months, sister. There’s lots of reasons why dating apps are annihilating your ability to find love, but your filters aren’t helping.

Women’s filters are why the top 78% of women in terms of ‘attractiveness’ on dating apps are competing for the top 20% of men. My theory is that if fuckboys do exist, and they’re becoming more prevalent, it’s because women are creating more of them from their dating app filters – why be a decent guy when 78% of women want you? There’s zero cost to being a shitty guy with those stats.

The reality is that men also don’t have the same issue. Men are far more likely to swipe right. Men have fewer expectations around their potential partner – they’re just grateful to be out, ladies. As such, the average man’s dating pool is typically much higher.

For example, most men have no issue with dating someone younger. Therefore, each year more women enter the average man’s dating pool (and the older you get the more people there are younger than you, ask Leonardo DiCaprio). In contrast, women will have fewer options in their pool as they get older. The typical reluctance for women to date down in age means men of similar age or slightly older exit the dating pool as they pair up, leaving fewer options for women.

Now it might take you longer to get over those other preferences, but the least you can do for your dating life is turning off the height filter on any dating apps. And this is just the pragmatic case. Even on the principled basis alone, you should. If the shoe were on the other foot and women were being filtered out for an immutable characteristic by a core function of an app, there would rightly be hell to pay. I won’t even mention them for fear of being dragged on Twitter.

And the height supremacy isn’t present in dating alone. 58% of Fortune 500 CEOs are over 6ft. For each extra inch you have in height you can expect to earn 1.8% more per year. These pay disparities are similar in magnitude to race and gender. Please ladies, don’t give those beanpoles the dating pool too. So let’s dismantle height supremacy together. How can I put this simply? Shag a short guy?