I’ve started to research height discrimination for a friend, because he told me he’s facing it while seeking employment. I had a hard time believing him, at first. Though I know it exists, I didn’t comprehend how pervasive it is, or that it impacted employment very much.
Needless to say, at 5’7″, I’m well aware that there’s height discrimination in attractiveness, particularly of men. My recent forays into some “redpill” online spaces and Asian American redpill online spaces exposed me to some discussion about this.
That this discrimination also carried over to work, again, was not a surprise, but it didn’t occur to me that it could impede someone from getting a regular job in retail or other customer-facing positions, particularly at larger companies. (I’ve mostly worked in IT or at intellectual jobs. I also live in a community of Asians and Latinos, mostly from Mexico or Central America, so the average height here is a little shorter than the national average.)
I did some reading, and, to both my surprise and dismay, height correlates with positive or negative life outcomes, ranging from employment, income, wealth, and suicide. It seems to affect people as much as race or other characteristics that are protected from discrimination by law.
I suggested that we do some field research to verify this discrimination, and identify if some companies engage in it, whether they know it or not.
To this end, here are some links to relevant articles, social media posts, and accounts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_discrimination
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/cm-621-height-weight-requirements
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/03/discrimination-for-short-statured-people
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1007306/the-big-short-how-height-discrimination-hurts-chinese-men
https://tsosensky.wixsite.com/heightism – Tanya Osensky, author of an award winning book about height discrimination.
https://www.jeetly.com/style-advice_dealing-with-height-discrimination-at-work_124
https://www.hcamag.com/us/news/general/height-discrimination-is-a-real-lawsuit-risk/155767
(Below this line are “war of the sexes” articles about height discrimination, gender, and relationships. I’ve separated them out because these are often written from a place of pain, and sometimes, anger. Some of this stuff is pretty toxic.)
https://www.theodysseyonline.com/exposing-heightism
https://heightismhub.freeforums.net/board/2/heightism-hub-main-forum
https://www.reddit.com/r/Heightdiscrimination/
https://www.reddit.com/r/short/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31569064/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/search/?q=height&restrict_sr=1&sr_nsfw=
https://isobellawolfe.com/2019/03/19/heightism/
Race, Class, Gender, and Differences that Make a Difference
What differences make a difference? Male height is a difference that appears to have follow-on effects in may different aspects of life, not only the most obvious one, of gendered height discrimination in mate selection.
Other bodily qualities also lead to discrimination: weight, skin lightness, “attractiveness”, conformance to White standards of beauty, butt size, hair color, age, language, ability/disability, LGBT presentation.
These can be understood as intersections of oppression, as intersectional feminists have done with the analysis of the intersections of race, class, gender, and other qualities.
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