What Is Heightism? The Bias No One Talks About (But Should)

Not the dramatic, obvious kind - the quiet, ever-persistent kind. The kind where you walk into a room and somehow feel like you have to work twice as hard to be taken seriously. Where you speak and someone talks over you. Where you dress carefully, carry yourself well, and still sense that something invisible is working against you.

For a long time, I thought that was just life. Just me. Just my imagination.

It isn’t.

What I was experiencing has a name, “heightism” and the research behind it is more sobering than most people realise. As someone who has spent over half a decade in the fashion industry as a petite woman, and built an entire brand around the reality that short women are consistently overlooked, I’ve had a front-row seat to this bias. I want to talk about it properly. Because it deserves more than a throwaway comment.

Heightism is discrimination or prejudice based on a person’s height. It can be overt, a cruel joke or a dismissive comment; but more often it’s structural. Embedded in assumptions about who is competent, who is authoritative, who leads. Studies have consistently shown that taller individuals are perceived as more capable, more attractive, and more deserving of respect, even when there is no logical basis for that perception [Stulp et al., PLOS ONE, 2015; Stulp & Barrett, Psychological Bulletin, 2016].

And yet, unlike other ‘isms’, heightism is rarely named as a legitimate form of discrimination. It’s brushed off. Laughed off. Treated as too trivial to take seriously. Which is, when you think about it, exactly the kind of thing that allows a bias to thrive.

Here’s where it stops feeling abstract. The financial cost of being short is documented, measurable, and genuinely significant.

Research published in the Journal of Political Economy found that each additional inch of height correlated with a 1.8% increase in wages - even when controlling for education and experience [Persico, Postlewaite & Silverman, 2004].

A separate study in the Journal of Applied Psychology went further, calculating that each inch above average height could translate to an additional $789 per year in earnings [Judge & Cable, 2004]. Over a 30-year career, that compounds into something close to $166,000 more for a taller woman than a shorter peer - for the same work, same qualifications, same everything.

This isn’t a pay gap rooted in gender or race - but they unfortunately intersect and compound it. This is a measurable economic penalty for being short. And it exists in near-silence.

The height premium doesn’t stop at salaries. It shapes who is seen as leadership material - and who isn’t.

A Baylor University study found that 90% of company CEOs are above average height. Job recruiters, when choosing between candidates of comparable backgrounds and skills, selected the taller candidate 72% of the time [Baylor University, cited in Shortchanged, Osensky, 2017]. Nearly three quarters of the time - not because of merit, but because of inches. That’s where Zoom interviews are doing the hard graft of levelling that out!

I find this both infuriating and fascinating in equal measure. We talk endlessly, and rightly, about bias in hiring: about the need for fairer processes, more representative leadership. And yet here is a documented, repeatable pattern of discrimination that barely registers in those conversations.

If you are a short woman navigating a workplace, you are likely contending with the compounded weight of both gender bias and height bias simultaneously; even more so if you are a woman of colour or have a disability or both. That’s exhausting; and it’s very real.

Beyond earnings and leadership, there’s something harder to quantify but no less important - the experience of being physically invisible. Short people know this intimately. Being overlooked in a crowd. Being spoken over in a meeting. Being literally unseen in spaces that weren’t designed with your proportions in mind. There’s a safety dimension here too - from navigating public transport, to being visible in a crowd, to the way the world’s physical infrastructure assumes a height that many of us simply don’t have.

This invisibility isn’t incidental. It’s a direct consequence of a culture that equates height with value, authority, and presence. When short women internalise that, when we shrink further to match the expectation, it costs us something.

I built DEWEY partly in response to this. Clothes that are designed to work with a petite frame aren’t just about aesthetics. They’re about showing up in the world without the constant low-level friction of things that don’t fit, physically or metaphorically. I have always said it, and I’ll say it forever; how can you step out into the world with your best foot forward if you don’t feel or look your best in clothing that actually fits you.

Tanya Osensky’s book Shortchanged: Height Discrimination and Strategies for Social Change makes an argument that is hard to ignore: that the attitudes directed at short people would simply not be acceptable if they were directed at any other minority group [Osensky, 2017]. The jokes, the diminutives, the casual dismissal; they persist because we’ve collectively decided this particular bias doesn’t count.

A 2024 review in Sociology Compass confirmed that heightism and the height premium are documented social realities - while also raising a sharper question: whether the research itself, in amplifying these findings through media coverage, has inadvertently helped entrench the very bias it sought to expose [Stulp, Sociology Compass, 2024]. It’s a genuinely uncomfortable thought. Does naming the height premium make it worse? Does it solidify an association between height and value that might otherwise weaken?

I don’t have a clean answer. But I think the alternative, staying silent, is worse. You cannot address a bias you refuse to name.

Over 50% of women in the UK and US are 5’4” or under. We are not a niche. We are not an edge case. We are, statistically, the norm - and yet the fashion industry, the workplace, and wider culture consistently treat us as an afterthought.

Heightism is part of why that happens. It’s the invisible architecture behind the assumption that petite women need less space, less fabric, less consideration, less pay. That we are decorative rather than authoritative. Present rather than powerful.

Recognising heightism, calling it what it is, and taking the research seriously, is a step towards dismantling that. Not because naming something fixes it, but because it gives us language. And language gives us the ability to push back.

I’m 5’2”. I’ve spent over a decade in an industry that routinely ignored women who look like me. I started a brand because I was tired of the friction - of clothes, and of systems, that weren’t made with us in mind.