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And why don't women want guys "shorter than me in heels"? Because guys shorter than them tend to be insecure about it. We can both go in circles about "men are whiny/no, women are whiny".
Short guys don't, in general, want women very much taller than them and tall women have a tough job finding men tall enough to date them.
I'm well aware that online women have basically infinite stamina when it comes to blaming men for women's preferences in their forever war to defend women's Wonderfulness. I'm also well aware that the evidence overwhelmingly supports the "Women Want a Daddy They Can Look up to" hypothesis much more than the "Men are Just Shitty and Insecure" hypothesis.
A consistent finding in the academic literature is that women care much more about male height than men care about female height. As one paper summarizes in its title: "Women want taller men more than men want shorter women."
"Women want taller men more than men want shorter women" is underselling it. This paper with the same first author uses North American speed-dating results (so revealed preferences through "yes/no" for willingness to match). There's a clear directionality in women preferring tall men, and men taller than themselves. To the extent men care about women's height, it's a mild preference for average height women over very short or very tall women—and possibly for tall women over short women.
Figure 4b illustrates this pretty simply and cleanly. Average height women (165cm) performed the best in men's evaluations, receiving about 49% "yes"s. The tallest women (binned to 175 and 177.5 cm from my eyeballing) are penalized all the way down to... a "yes" rate of 45%. The shortest women, binned to 152.5 and 155cm, received a "yes" rate of about 44% or so. On the other hand, it's Mendoza Line vs. MVP-caliber for men, where the yes rate is 20% for men binned to 165cm, rising to about 34% by 180cm, to about 37% by 192.5 cm. Across all height spectrums women got more "yes"s than men.
Figure 5 is an amusing complement to Figure 4b. This time it shows evaluations based on male-female-pairing height differentials. Using the curve that was fit, men most preferred women who were about 5 cm shorter than them, giving a "yes" response about 47% of the time to such women. For women 15cm taller than them, this drops to a whopping... 44% or so.
In contrast, women most preferred men who were about 25 cm taller than them, at a "yes" rate of about 34%. For men at their height, this drops down to about 24%. For men 15cm shorter than them, this drops further to about 13%. Similar story with Figure 5 as to Figure 4b. Women care a lot more about male height than vice versa. If anything men reward rather than penalize taller women, and penalize rather than reward much shorter women.
The highest point estimate attained was that of men giving a 59% or so yes rate to women 15 cm taller than them. While it could be a statistical artifact, perhaps there is indeed a population of short kings out there looking for some Snoo Snoo or hoping that a potential son doesn't suffer the same fate. On the flip side, Male "yes"s for women start declining after 5 cm on the curve, 7.5 cm if using point estimates.
Thus, the evidence is peskily inconsistent with women's revealed preferences for taller men being driven by shorter men being Shitty and Insecure, as men's own revealed preferences don't even express such a mirrored preference for shorter/short women. However, it's peskily consistent with women preferring a daddy they can look up to.
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You can find a lot more men willing to date taller women than women willing to date shorter men. Just like how being fat tends to impact a woman's attractiveness much more than a man's. Both sexes can be shallow, but because they are different they are shallow in different ways.
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