Nearly 1 in 3 Fortune 500 CEOs in one famous survey was 6’2″ or taller.
But many of America’s best-known company founders are much closer to average height.
Does being tall help you climb the corporate ladder but matter less when you build the ladder yourself?
How Tall Is the Average American?
According to CDC measurements collected from 2021 to 2023, the average American man is about 5’9″, while the average American woman is about 5’3½”.
That makes some of the numbers around corporate leadership especially interesting.
CEOs Are Surprisingly Tall
A famous survey reported in 2005 looked at roughly half of the Fortune 500 CEOs and found:
- 58% were at least 6 feet tall.
- 30% were 6’2″ or taller.
For comparison, only about 4% of American men in the population used for that comparison were 6’2″ or taller.
There is an important catch: those CEO numbers are about 20 years old. They shouldn’t be treated as a description of today’s Fortune 500.
But the broader connection between height and success hasn’t disappeared from the research.
What About Money?
A 2023 review examined 42 studies looking at height and earnings.
Of those, 33 found evidence of what researchers call a “height premium.”
In plain English: taller people tended to earn more.
Other research has also found connections between height and reaching leadership or management positions.
But that doesn’t mean being tall causes someone to become successful.
Researchers have found that factors including education, occupation and childhood development can explain at least part of the relationship.
And then there’s something much harder to measure:
How other people see us.
So, Does Height Really Matter?
Maybe the more interesting question isn’t whether tall people make better leaders.
There’s no evidence here that they do.
The question is whether we sometimes see someone as a leader before they’ve actually proven themselves to be one.
Height is something most of us have almost no control over.
Yet research suggests it may be connected, directly or indirectly, to who earns more, who reaches management and who gets seen as leadership material.
Sometimes seemingly small differences between us can quietly be connected to much bigger outcomes.