From The Economist This is the subscription-only section-so I just cut & pasted. It's pretty funny.... (for what it's worth, I like tall women....) The long and the short of it Aug 15th 2002 From The Economist print edition Short women have more children than tall ones THAT tall men have more sexual partners and more children than their shorter brethren is well known. The reason is that height in men is attractive to women. But it is a comment on who the authors of such studies usually are that the opposite question—how a woman's height affects the number of children she has—has not been asked until now. Daniel Nettle, of the Open University in Britain, has done so. And the answer, soon to be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, is that women do better reproductively if they are shorter than average. On the face of it, that is surprising. Given that tall men have more children, and that height is, at least in part, inherited, it might be expected that men would prefer tall women because they would produce tall (and so sexually successful) sons. But that is not the case. A woman's height is not a consideration in the eyes of most men. However, an analysis of the lives of 5,000 women born in Britain in March 1958 suggests that short women have larger families than tall ones, an effect that is independent of such factors as the tendency of people from poor families to be shorter than those from rich ones. Dr Nettle suggests it is because short women become fertile earlier (the same hormonal processes that terminate growth are also responsible for sexual maturation). This increased number of children would counterbalance the sexiness of the sons of tall women, resulting in equal numbers of grandchildren and explaining why height per se is irrelevant to a woman's attractiveness to men. Tough on short men, though.