Virtual world, same rules
Even in the digital arena, height matters
“I'll have you know I'm not actually that short. I'm 5’ 7’’, which is a fairly normal height. It's just that I have to stand next to giant Jeremy [Clarkson], who's about 8’’.”
Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond after making the "weird crush" list in Heat magazine
As we draw nearer the end of proceedings, it is worth noting that this newsletter wasn’t even meant to be a newsletter. I was searching for something to fill my suddenly-free time during coronavirus lockdown, part one.
The plan was to write a longread on perceptions of height to flog on a freelance basis. Things started spiralling as I conducted more research.
I posted on Twitter that “as a small person, I ended up writing 10,000 words on whether height still matters during lockdown for no reason other than I could. Just read it back and reckon it’s alright. If you fancy a freelance commish holla #journorequest”.
The first response was “oh, this is interesting. Could Zoom undo this weirdly acceptable prejudice?”
That was a random internet bystander. An actual friend of mine then chimed in to say a pal of his had started a new job during lockdown, and was absolutely adamant that people respected her more because none of them knew that she is very, very small.
I hadn’t thought about how a virtual world would change things like job interviews and dates for short people. It wasn’t something I had planned on tackling. Then I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and it is as good a place to conclude our thoughts on how society views stature, whether height still matters, and whether it will still matter going forward as any.
I am clearly not the only one who has dedicated some brain space to the impact our new virtual world could have on physical prejudice. Barely a week later, I was on a Zoom chat with some of my wife’s friends, one of whom had just started a new job right as the pandemic struck.
Asked how it was going, she replied, as my memory serves: “It’s so strange, because I’ve not even met them yet. They don’t know how tall I am, they don’t really know what I look like...
(I say as memory serves, I scribbled some notes the second we got off the call. Hiding in a corner to jot down observations is something that would be socially unacceptable at a real life party, granted, but at least my recollections here are pretty much word for word thanks to the fact I was in my own living room.)
I can certainly relate to her comments anyway, having gone through my own interview experience when I found a new job during lockdown. That my future colleagues were unaware of my current stature was both a relief and something that filled me with trepidation.
I had never really considered that my height would be something that would immediately put me on the back foot with someone. But after doing a bunch of research for this book, I am mostly glad that the entirety of the process was managed through video calls.
From the neck up, I am just like any other candidate. My CV contains the same words as everyone else’s. My online presence lists the same qualifications. Controlling for height is actually bliss, as was not having to wear my tallest shoes, as I have done for important meetings in the past.
The trepidation came from the potential judgment I would receive when I arrived in person as someone who is highly unlikely to measure up to expectations of me. I looked forward to seeing the look on my new colleagues’ faces when I finally walked through the door. Surprised, I imagined. Disappointed, I hoped not.
Yes, the pros of a virtual interview for a short candidate will almost certainly outweigh the cons, since comparative height differences between the interviewee, interviewer and rival candidates will be less stark. But I see no reason why remote working would eliminate all of these kinds of biases altogether. If you consistently see that chief executives are tall, and continually imagine them that way, then that’s what you will be primed to look for, even digitally. It is about as clear an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy as you could ever wish for.
That’s not to say that there will never be the chance of positive discrimination for short people. I have very occasionally found that in real life, people assume shorter people are more intelligent. Perhaps it’s because they believe that smaller people will likely have retreated to books and solitary learning, given in all likelihood they will have struggled to socialise and been subject to greater levels of bullying. Or perhaps it is because they think all short people are distantly related to the character Carlton from 90s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air - a character who is highly rational, but is simultaneously short. But being a bit of a swot is hardly enough to put you in prime position against dozens of other candidates in the professional world.
A video call is evidently a blurrier depiction of reality than an in-person meeting. To an extent, that helps control for those qualities that might become a factor in employment selection but aren’t intrinsically linked to job performance like attractiveness.
From virtual dates and social interactions to these distance job interviews, people will continue to make the argument that height will matter less across a number of strains of our existence going forward as we move to a different kind of society, one where the virtual dominates over the physical. However, if you were to argue that this would have a significant effect, or would measurably mitigate the impact that size has on life outcomes, I would politely suggest that the argument holds about as much water as a pound shop sieve.
Say there are more virtual dates in the future. Will that not just lead us to focus even more on key numbers like height when choosing who to link up with? In the more organic meetings of non-virtual life there is more room to manoeuvre, more space for interpretation. For an array of reasons, we might find ourselves falling for someone who would never have been what we expected on paper, a pleasant jolt of surprise as they sweep us off our feet in spite of having traits we would not typically find attractive. This would rarely be the case in the digital world, as algorithms and web forms are specifically built for us to filter out those on the fringes of desirability.
Most people would want a partner who is, at the very least, good on paper. Even if they turn out to be a rotter afterwards, you will still apply some kind of screening process on the kind of person you would prefer to encounter. This may evolve over time, and you may find yourself drawn towards someone you didn’t expect, but it’s still there. Otherwise questions like “what are you looking for in a boy/girlfriend” would be nonsensical. Those questions are amplified in the modern world of digital dating and will continue to be so.
Even if we don’t want to admit it, on that relationship Top Trumps card, height is one of a handful of key stats we focus on, just like we rarely admit that we tend to screen for income, weight, and a whole host of other physical and non-physical traits. Virtual dating profiles are essentially your personal stat card for romantic suitability. Here is what I have to offer. Please let it be good enough. Please like it. In real life you don’t get all of those metrics laid out for you. Some may slip by you. Not so on dating apps. The profile is a permanent monument to where someone does and does not stack up.
You will have to produce some kind of visual verification you are not a monster in either digital or physical format. Even if you managed to pick a dating site where you can hide your height, we are all subconsciously making calculations regardless. Among your photographs, you may well be pictured next to friends, or to common objects we can estimate the height of, like a doorway, a table, or a car. Perspective and relativity allow our minds to fill in the blanks, so much so that, according to tech website Techwalla, “criminal investigations often require an estimated height and they will use photographs to create a height range for a subject”.
We also have an uncanny ability to guess someone’s height accurately from looking at the dimensions of their head. One 2014 Nepali study found that “head circumference showed highly significant positive correlation with individual[s]'s height.
The bigger the person, the bigger the head. You might not be shocked by that finding, but again, the correlation is so strong that it can be used to pin down the size of an individual when this might be called into question.
“The present study will help in medico-legal cases in establishing the identity of an individual,” the paper adds.
If race is discernible from, say a photo of a job applicant or a potential date, our minds also take a shortcut towards a likely height measurement, given we know the average inhabitant of a Nordic country will be taller than the average one of a nation in the developing world.
We’ve all got roughly the same distance between where our eye level sits compared to our overall height too, allowing us to make ready comparisons when individuals are standing next to each other as to their height based on where their eyes come into shot.
They may not pitch it in such scientific terms, but when articles like “How can you tell if a guy is short from pictures?” and “15 Genius Ways To Figure Out How Tall A Guy Is On A Dating App” proliferate, you can tell it’s what people are doing anyway.
Just a side note, I’m not sure the writer understands what the word genius means, since these “genius” ways include “casually send him a picture of Napoleon and see how he reacts” and “tell him you have some peanut butter you're craving but can't reach it on the high shelf and see how he reacts”. Yup, that’ll catch him. Good work Columbo. Those questions, and indeed avoiding them, undoubtedly exhibit Mensa levels of intelligence.
People are, apparently, going to extreme lengths to vet their dating app conquests to make sure they are not committing the cardinal sin of bumping up their height by a couple of inches. Again, this paints a bleak picture that contrasts with the optimists that believe our future world will be one where height difference will simply melt away into the digital ether.
“Hi I’m Dani and I’ll find out what your height is no matter the cost,” posts one user of TikTok, before using her own actual spare time to count how many bottles of the Corona beer her potential love interest is holding in his picture would need to be stacked end to end to equal his height, using the dimensions of each to reach an estimate of how tall he really is.
Instead of being branded insane for her unhealthy need to pseudo-scientifically verify another human’s stature, or for her adopting a default setting that they are lying about it, another TikTok user weighs in to provide a template mathematical formula for anyone else looking to conduct similar calculations.
“This is the only time maths skills come in handy,” they write. I’m going to assume it’s a joke, judging from context, but if you only had the person’s profile to go by, there’s no way anyone could be 100 per cent sure she had never found another use for maths in her life up to that point.
In response to the article “How can you tell if a guy is short from pictures?”, another responder very unhelpfully turns up the temperature by replying: “How can you tell if a girl is a fatty from pictures?”
Granted, that’s a suboptimal way to react to inquisition about height. Two wrongs don’t make a right, even if we could ignore the nasty gender politics of it all. But the ensuing thread on The Student Room might make people think about how others would react if we applied such a forensic review to their appearances.
Now let’s go back to the case of the virtual job interview. Again, a more thorough assessment of how the job market works doesn’t necessarily lend itself to giving short people a leg up if part of it is done remotely.
I cannot think of a single job that wouldn’t require either visual or vocal contact with a candidate before officially hiring them, meaning there will always be an opportunity for us to subconsciously weigh up their size credentials while we weigh up whether they are the right fit for the job.
Bizarrely, we also get a discreet inkling as to how tall an individual is from the sound of their voice. Age? Sure, you might have guessed we would have an ability to tell how well-used a larynx is when we hear the noises it makes. Health conditions? Sure, there might be subtle undertones of wear and tear in someone’s timbre. But height? How on earth can I be giving away clues that I’m shorter than you in my voice?
A study in the Evolutionary Psychology journal by researchers at Nottingham Trent University showed our guesses as to a person’s age are only four years apart from when we see a face compared to when we hear the same voice. Sound clips and facial images weren’t played in sequence and were randomised; this was an average of independent ratings of both voices and faces individually, not matching a face to the same person’s voice or vice versa.
When asked to score for height on a seven point scale, where a result of 1 would be perfect correlation, participants came out with a relationship match to the voices of 0.84. That is much, much closer than you might get by chance.
The fact is, no matter how successful our transition towards a virtual world of work is, there will always be occasions where it is simply unavoidable to meet your colleagues in person. There will be key meetings, site visits, events, celebrations and more that will involve a human-to-human professional and social interaction.
It is true that these will likely be much more limited than they were in the past now that we’ve learned how to both work and play miles apart from each other. Their importance has not lessened, however. As any office-based worker will attest, those face-to-face encounters are the critical moments where deeper personal relationships are formed, alliances are struck, and the (tall) top brass are brown-nosed.
They are exactly the kind of occasions where people have felt the need to actively bend their knees and crouch before talking to me. This happens not as a show of deference, but occurs as if my words were inaudible if they were uttered more than two inches away from the receiver’s ears.
They are the kind of events where people have actively asked if we can sit down somewhere to talk instead of doing so standing, because stooping is causing them difficulties. My need to crane my neck upwards to speak in a crowd for a few hours has never been more than a mild discomfort. Giving these people the benefit of the doubt, I’ve had a lot of practice. My neck straining muscles are well honed. Not giving them the benefit of the doubt, I feel terribly sorry speaking to me has caused them to alter the angle of their head by a few degrees. Either way, it is a suboptimal interruption when you’re trying to have a vital chat about career progression.
Next week: the final chapter, rolling everything we’ve learned together.