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In the Twenty-First Century, People Are Still Bothered by Tall Women
How an award-winning actress was told her height would keep her from having a career
Nicole Kidman recently made headlines when she revealed that she lied about her height to secure auditions in Hollywood early in her career.
Because she’s a woman, Kidman didn’t add a couple of inches to her height; when seeking auditions, she took half an inch off her actual height of 5 feet 11 inches so that she’d be deemed more acceptable for film roles.
Why, with all our centuries of human progress, are we all still so hung up on what we deem the appropriate heights for people?
The Variability of Human Height Over Time
If you want to have enough reading material for a lifetime, go online and start to research how human heights are affected by genetics and also by environmental factors like nutrition. Reading this one article on the subject at the Our World in Data site alone could take you the rest of the day.
But one of the very first and most important takeaways of that article is this one: “It is important to stress that height is not used as a direct measure of well-being. The variation of height within a population is largely…
