Up to 3 Inches.
Zero giveaway.

Nobody puts height on a job application, yet the paycheck seems to notice anyway.

Researchers at the University of Exeter looked at around 120,000 people in the UK Biobank. Instead of simply comparing tall and short people, they used the genes that make people taller, which nobody gets to choose. That makes it a rare, fairly clean test.

For men, standing about 3 inches taller was linked to roughly £1,500 (around $2,000) more household income a year. Taller men were also more likely to have a degree and a higher-status job.

The fine print: it's household income, it's an average, and no study has shown that taller shoes get you a raise. But first impressions count, and standing taller is one of the easiest ones to change.

Picture the person at the head of the boardroom table. In your head, he's probably tall. Your imagination has done its research.

Economists studied more than a million Swedish men who were measured at 18 for military service, then checked who became a CEO decades later. The typical large-company CEO stood about two-thirds of a standard deviation above average: taller than roughly 3 in 4 men.

Height wasn't the whole story. What set CEOs apart most was leadership and people skills, and the researchers' own verdict was that traits are "necessary but not sufficient." Nobody ever turned a company around by being 6'2" at people.

But presence counts, especially before anyone has seen what you can do.

If you've been on a dating app, you've seen it: 6ft+ only, sorry.

A 2026 University of St Andrews study asked 242 young adults in the UK what they look for. About 43% of women rated a partner's height as important or very important, compared with about 26% of men.

The good news hiding in that number: most women surveyed, around 57%, didn't rate height as important at all. The study also found the strictest height rules tended to go with more traditional views about gender roles.

So height matters to a lot of people, but it's rarely the whole story. It's a small study, and height isn't a personality. If you show up 3 inches taller and spend the whole date on your crypto portfolio, the shoes can't save you.