Just thought Id answer this with hard facts.
In the U.K only 3.7% of marriages are with a taller female/shorter male.
3.7%!
1 in friggin 27 marriages!
Give up?
Not exactly.
You see, because of average height differentials between males and females - if randomly paired up - only 8.5% of male/female couples would be with a shorter male/taller female.
So 3.7/8.5 = 43% of average. That makes it rarer than average (100%) but far from totally weird.
(For the source of this statistic:
http://personal.lse.ac.uk/sear/pdfs/sear_marlowe.p
or google "hadza height" and to try and find the paper if the link doesn't work anymore)
Also I read an article by Katie Bolick called "All the single Ladies"
recently - heres a link, but it might not stay active forever -
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc … dies/8654/
which stated that a study found that there had been a 40% increase in the number of shorter male/taller female marriages. I cannot state whether that 40% is after or before the 3.7% stat above. If its before, the calculation stands.
If not, that means its actually 5.2/8.5 = 60%.
Actually Dalton Conoly, a sociologist at NYU did the statistical analysis of a nationally representative sample (in the USA) and found the number to be 4.2% in 2003, up from 3.8% in 1986. So where did the 5.2 number come from? Hard to say (till he publishes his paper, probably in mid 2012). I figure its 4.2 now, but thats only among the young age group due to changing norms... and it will increase to 5.2% if projected to future trends... hard to say...but even 4.2/8.5=50%
Another reason to believe the 5.2% statistic comes from the 2009 edition (NOT the older 2007 edition) of the book "Microtrends" which did an online survey in 2008 and found just over 5% of couples were "Interspatial", meaning boy shorter than girl. As we dont have access to the raw data, once again... wait for Dalton Conoly's paper. You can read the relevant 3 pages of the "Microtrends" book by googling "Microtrends Interspatial Couples" and reading it on Google books (at the time of this writing anyway).
In any case, however you look at it, its far from zero. It just seems way rarer than it is because of demographics where only ~ 1 in 12 couples would be interspatial due to average height differentials. (And there certainly is a lot of discrimination, maybe even instinct against it)?
So, to summarize, it happens either 43% or 50% or 60% of the time. And according to Microtrends, it happens a lot more among richer better educated people.
Personally Ive had quite a few taller girls wanting to make me their boyfriend (Im quite short). But I could never do it. It was horrible to see those hot girls give up and get a taller boyfriend... so I have a huge interest in these statistics and how they are changing over time.
