Are you paying too much for people in heels?

I have spent a good part of my career being unnecessarily impressed by tall men. Not because they said anything clever — usually they hadn't — but because when they stood up at the end of a meeting, the room seemed to agree with them slightly more than it had 30 seconds earlier.

This is, apparently, not a personal failing. It's a documented feature of the human operating system, and it is quietly costing Canadian employers real money. 

Let's start with the number that should make every VP of total rewards sit up: economists Timothy Judge (University of Florida) and Daniel Cable (UNC Chapel Hill) pooled four long-running studies from the US and Britain and found that every extra inch of height was worth roughly $789 a year in earnings, after controlling for gender, age and weight. Someone six feet tall could therefore expect to out-earn someone five-foot-five (me) by about $5,525 a year — which, compounded over a 30-year career, becomes the kind of sum that funds a very comfortable retirement, or a rather splendid new terrarium for my pet tortoise (Judge & Cable, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2004).

Judge himself put it plainly: "Height matters for career success." 

Rival camp looks at height

Now, before the six-footers in the room start feeling smug, a rival camp of economists would like a word. Anne Case and Christina Paxson of Princeton looked at British and American cohort data and concluded the whole thing is less about boardroom charisma and more about biology doing paperwork early: taller children, on average, post higher cognitive test scores, and those scores explain a good chunk of the adult earnings gap (Case & Paxson, "Stature and Status," Journal of Political Economy, 2008). It's the empirical equivalent of two consultants billing you for opposite conclusions — one says it's bias, the other says taller people are smarter — and the honest answer is that nobody has fully closed the file. Either way, the correlation between height and pay itself isn't in dispute. 

What is in dispute is how big it is where you actually operate. A 2023 meta-analysis pooling 17 studies found the wage premium per 10 centimetres of height ran to about 4% in the US, 7% in the UK, and considerably higher — 9% to 14% — in parts of Asia and Latin America (Thompson, Portrait & Schoonmade, Economics & Human Biology, 2023). Canada wasn't broken out separately, so treat this as a reasonable working assumption rather than gospel, but there's no obvious reason our labour market runs on entirely different wiring than our southern neighbour's. 

Gender pay gap

Here's an uncomfortable piece of arithmetic worth doing before anyone congratulates themselves on closing the gender pay gap this quarter. A large international height study led by Imperial College London put the average Canadian man at about 178 cm and the average Canadian woman at about 164 cm as of 2014 — a gap of roughly 14 centimetres, or five-and-a-half inches. Apply the Judge and Cable per-inch figure to that gap alone, purely as back-of-envelope arithmetic, and you get something in the region of $4,300 a year — in the same ballpark as an informal, non-peer-reviewed estimate circulating online that height differences alone could account for a meaningful slice of the raw gender pay gap in the US (Advisorpedia, "Height, Income, and Inequality").

Treat that figure with real suspicion, though: it's illustrative arithmetic, not a finding from either study, and the underlying research complicates it. Judge and Cable's per-inch effect held up even after controlling for gender, meaning height isn't simply gender wearing a disguise. Case and Paxson trace most of it to cognitive test scores rather than stature itself.

And when the American Psychological Association summarised the original height-earnings research, it noted a detail that cuts against the tidy version of this story: shorter men appeared to face somewhat more workplace height bias than shorter women did (American Psychological Association, Monitor on Psychology, 2004). So the defensible claim is narrower than "shortness explains the pay gap" — it's that any evaluation system quietly rewarding physical stature will, on average, tilt toward men as a group, simply because men are on average taller, regardless of which underlying mechanism turns out to be doing the work. 

The beauty premium

Which brings us to the heels. 

If height itself commands a premium partly through perception — taller people rated as more authoritative, more competent, more "leadership material" by people who've never seen them do a single day's actual leading — then anything that manufactures the appearance of height ought to nudge those same dials.

A 2025 study tracking more than 43,000 MBA graduates over 15 years found a comparable "beauty premium" running through appearance more broadly: attractive graduates earned about 2.4% more, roughly $2,508 a year, than plainer-looking peers with the same credentials, rising past 11% — about $5,528 a year — for the most conventionally attractive tenth of the group, and they were 52.4% more likely to be holding a prestigious job fifteen years out (Malik & Singh, "When Does Beauty Pay?," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, 2025).

Posture, presence, a good pair of heels, a well-cut blazer with shoulder pads doing structural work — none of it changes a candidate's actual output, but all of it is quietly voting on your comp decisions if your evaluation process leaves the door open. 

Height and weight criteria

This is the bit that should  worry a Canadian employer, because it isn't hypothetical. 

Height and weight criteria have a long, undistinguished history in Canadian hiring — flight attendants of a certain era were required to be a specific height, weight, age and, handily, unmarried. The Ontario Human Rights Commission has been explicit that facially neutral height and weight standards can still contravene the Human Rights Code where they screen out women or particular ethnic groups disproportionately, unless the employer can clear the bona fide occupational requirement bar set out by the Supreme Court in Ontario Human Rights Commission v. Etobicoke — a test that is, deliberately, hard to pass.

Manitoba went further with Bill 200, tabled to add "physical size or weight" as an explicitly protected ground in its Human Rights Code — reported at the time as a first for a Canadian jurisdiction, and a signal of where other provinces may eventually land. 

None of that legislation currently stops a hiring panel from unconsciously rating the six-foot-two candidate as "more executive presence" than the five-foot-six one with the identical resume. But it should focus the mind, because the mechanism that produces a $5,525-a-year pay gap in academic studies is exactly the mechanism — unstructured judgment, "fit," "gravitas," "how they carried themselves in the room" — that shows up in your own promotion committee minutes. 

Correctiing the height bias

So what does a sensible Canadian employer do with all this? 

First, look at where your evaluation process still runs on vibes: unstructured interviews, subjective 9-box calibration meetings, sales attribution that leans on "who the client trusted." These are exactly the settings where the height-and-appearance effect has been shown to bite hardest, particularly in sales and management roles. 

Second, if a role genuinely has a physical height or reach requirement, document the occupational reason and be ready to defend it as a bona fide requirement — not a holdover assumption from 1974. 

Third, train the people running interviews and calibration sessions on the halo effect specifically, rather than bias training in the abstract. People are far better at correcting for a bias they've been shown data on than one they've merely been told exists. 

And fourth — purely as a thought experiment, not a policy proposal — the next time a candidate walks in six inches taller than usual because of their shoes, ask yourself honestly whether you're about to rate the shoes. 

I fully expect several tall readers to write in about how none of this is their fault, which is correct, it isn't. Nobody is suggesting punishing anyone for the dimensions they were issued at birth. The point is narrower and considerably less comfortable: if your organisation's evaluation systems are quietly rewarding height, they're doing it on your budget, without your sign-off, and almost certainly without you having noticed.

Somewhere in your comp data, there may be a height premium you never approved. It might be worth checking before someone else does. 

Susan Essex is a researcher and journalist at Key Media, primarily focusing on Insurance Business UK, Canada and the US with experience working for Investment News and Mortgage Professional.