This can't be good for my career prospects.

Height May Make or Break Your Career

Tall people may the have upper hand when it comes to financial and career success, and not just on the basketball court.

A new study shows that tall people earn more money throughout their lives and are more successful in their careers than short people.

"Height matters for career success," says researcher Timothy Judge, a management professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, in a news release. "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."

Researchers examined four previously published studies in the U.S. and U.K. that followed thousands of people from children to adulthood and tracked details of their career success and personal lives along with their height. The results are scheduled for publication in spring 2004 in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

After controlling for factors such as gender, age, and weight, researchers found that a difference of mere inches in height made a big difference in terms of annual income. In fact, every extra inch added up to an extra $789 in pay.

For example, someone who was six feet tall earned an average of about $5,525 more than someone who was seven inches shorter.

"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," says Judge.

Researchers also found that height was most closely tied to success among occupations that rely on appearance and stature as a measure of success, such as sales and management. Height was more also predictive of earnings in blue-collar jobs than in professional-technical jobs such as engineering.

"If height has the social status we think it does, it stands to reason that tall people would sell more cars because they're seen as a more authoritative source on the matter," says Judge.

Researchers say that people's perceptions of tall people may be a remnant of our evolutionary origins.

Judge says that continuing to rely on those outdated perceptions may not only cause unfair discrimination, but it could have serious economic repercussions.

"If we're giving great weight to an attribute like height that's irrelevant to performance on the job, then we're introducing error in our hiring and promotion decisions that causes inefficiencies in our economy," says Judge.

Originally published here.