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Short people may be short-changed when it comes to salary, status and respect, according to a University of Florida study that found tall people earn considerably more money throughout their lives.

“Height matters for career success,” said Timothy Judge, a UF management professor whose research was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. “These findings are troubling in that, with a few exceptions such as professional basketball, no one could argue that height is an essential ability required for job performance nor a bona fide occupational qualification.”

Judge and Daniel Cable, a business professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, analyzed the results of four large-scale research studies — three in the United States and one in Great Britain — which followed thousands of participants from childhood to adulthood, examining details of their work and personal lives.

Judge’s study, which controlled for gender, weight and age, found that mere inches cost thousands of dollars. Each inch in height amounted to about $789 more a year in pay, the study found. So someone who is 7 inches taller — say 6 feet versus 5 feet 5 inches — would be expected to earn $5,525 more annually, he said.

“If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it, we’re talking about literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage that a tall person enjoys,” Judge said.

The research showed that height was even more important than gender in determining income, and its significance does not decline as a person ages. The study found it was as predictive of earnings when employees were in their 40s and had accumulated some work experience as it was when they were in their 20s and were just starting out, he said.

Height’s commanding influence may be a remnant of our evolutionary origins, when humans lived among animals, which use size as an index of power and strength when making “fight or flight” decisions, he said.

“When humans evolved as a species and still lived in the jungles or on the plain, they ascribed leader-like qualities to tall people because they thought they would be better able to protect them,” Judge said. “Although that was thousands of years ago, evolutionary psychologists would argue that some of those old patterns still operate in our perceptions today.”

The average height of Americans today is 69.1 inches for men and 63.7 inches for women.

Timothy Judge, tjudge@ufl.edu

by Cathy Keen