Shorter Men Are More Likely To Be Gay
This is an OkTrends micro-post: weird, interesting, or provocative stuff that we've found in the online dating data mines.
Looking for some trends to write longer posts about, we stumbled upon a remarkable fact. Extremely short and extremely tall men seem to be much more likely to be gay or bisexual:
This effect is most pronounced with especially short men. A guy in the 5th percentile by height (shorter than 5′ 5″) is 70% more likely to be queer than a man of average height (5′ 10″). a man in the 5th percentile by height is 70% more likely to be gay or bi than a man of average height We have no idea why this is. If queerness is genetic, then perhaps its determinant gene or genes sits near the genes that determine height? I looked around and could find no medical study investigating the correlation. Any geneticists out there?
Anyhow, here are a few baseline facts about our sample population: 10.1% of our male users describe themselves as gay or bisexual. 90% of the men OkCupid are between 5′ 5″ and 6′ 3″. Of course, height is self-reported, but we’ve found, surprisingly enough, that men seem to be pretty honest about it. The curve below, for the dataset we used for this here micro-post, is very similar to the latest National Health Statistics Report published by the CDC.
An upcoming big blog post will investigate exactly how much people lie in their profiles, but it seems at first blush that men are relatively honest about how tall they are. I guess it’d be a hard lie to get away with if you ever meet someone in person.
We’ll post the corresponding chart for women tomorrow.
Wow, women are already really shallow when it comes to height, and now they have this as fodder. I feel sorry for those straight short guys.
Of course, the idea that shorter or taller men are more unpopular and thus more likely to feel comfortable coming out is also worth exploring.
I’d say it is clear from the data
that the short guys are already swimming in women, and comparatively more of the ‘desperate’ short gay people come to OKCupid to find their love that they couldn’t find elsewhere.
Ot maybe not..
To M – just want to note that while some (or possibly many) women/girls may be shallow about a man’s height, it’s a pretty unfair generalization to just say “women are”. Half or more of the boys I’ve dated and loved have been my height or shorter.
Yeah. Male homosexuality is strongly correlated with how many older brothers a man has (the “fraternal birth order effect”), and another strong correlate is low birth weight, which might plausibly be related to adult height, though I’m unaware of any studies on that specifically. Yours is a good guess but it’s actually thought that this isn’t quite genetic: the “maternal immune hypothesis” says that male-specific proteins in a developing womb can cause an immune reaction in the mother that silences those proteins’ masculinizing effects in subsequent pregnancies.
Here’s a good, user-friendly review: http://www.pnas.org/content/103/28/10531 (not sure if access is free). And of course it’s on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternal_birth_order
Well, the following is obviously not a final answer on the subject but just a hint.
Low intra-uterine concentration of testosterone affects both gender development and bones growth. Incidentally, this situation also affects chance of developing mental disorders in adult life and seems to be triggered by a highly stressful environment over the peri-natal period. I published a paper on the subject. Look for Simon Collinson 2010.
Cheers,
Attilio
Very interesting data, but I’m not sure the headline is justified. Perhaps “Shorter Gay Men Are More Likely To Be Single Than Shorter Straight Men”?
Is this from OKCupid data? If that is the case, your findings can be easily explained through a selection argument. The height/queerness relationship is exactly what you would find if gays are more picky about height than heterosexuals. If short gay men have a harder time on the dating market than short straight men then more of them would end up trying their luck on a dating site. Hence you would find a disproportionate amount of short gay people. The real population distribution looks likely very different from the one of the self-selcted OKCupid sample.
Way to pick on two groups of people that really deserve it.