A Truth About the Glass Ceiling No One Wants to Talk About

Anecdotal, but in my experience smart girls are uglier and cute girls are stupider.

This is verified by comparing 2 groups: nightclub girls and science research nerd girls.

As a group the nerd girls are uglier on average, because there are several severely plain nerd girls, though an individual nerd girl may be very attractive.

As a group the disco girls are stupider on average, because there are several severely ditzy disco girls, though an individual disco girl may have brains.

I believe the reason for this is that it takes effort to make yourself attractive, just as it takes effort to make yourself smart, so there is a trade off.

I feel compelled to include a link to Roy Baumeister's "Is There Anything Good About Men?": http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm. It is possible that there are fewer women in the upper echelons of business because evolutionarily women didn't have to take as many risks as men in order to reproduce. So men are biologically programmed to take risks, and either spectacularly succeed or spectacularly fail. Hence there are more male CEOs, but there are also more male homeless, for example.

Of course to test the theory the attractiveness should be judged based on their appearance at about age 22 and the judgement made by men 5-15 years older who were making the hiring judgements at the time.

I doubt this is very explanatory.

Height is doubtless correlated with athleticism, but it's fairly weakly correlated. Except in basketball, when you see a group of athletes, you'll tend to see a range of heights. A little taller than average? Sure. But not immensely so.

And then, athleticism is doubtless correlated with admission to elite universities, but, again, only weakly so. The top tier and second tier universities like to see some extracurricular activities on your record, but "being good at cross country running" is far from a sure-fire way to get into Harvard. The REALLY good athletes don't go to top-tier academic universities, and don't get corporate jobs -- they're on the pro athlete track.

You might get into Harvard due to being a good football player but not good enough to go pro, even if you were not otherwise academically capable of going to Harvard. But, first, you're now talking about a small percentage of Harvard students. Second, I'd like to see some data before I'd concede that IF you're clearly not elite-university quality academically, BUT you get in on your athletic merits, AND you go into a corporate track job, THEN you end up with an elite career path.

So, long story short: Is there probably some advantage to height through the path you suggest? Yes, probably some measurable advantage. Is it enough to explain the pretty substantial advantage that tall men enjoy according to the literature? I can't see how. It's passing through too many weak correlations.

Sure, but making that argument is entering a mined field. You could as well say that skin color is correlated with intelligence because (I'm just making this up) living in Africa was easier than in harsher climates so their brains got smarter.

Btw, it's easy to see if your hypothesis is correct. Just check the heights of graduate males of tough university programs such as medical research, physics, mathematics etc. I belive that the distribution of their heights will be closer to the population average than the heights of CEO:s, top politicians and other "high-status" jobs. I belive it is because those positions isn't selected to solely on merit, but also on charisma or vaguely defined "leadership qualities."

In my experience, with lots of developers and engineers I've worked with, there is no height bias among them. Tall and short engineers and everyone in between. However, upper management and the sales guys are generally tall guys. Now, assuming that height is positively correlated with intelligence, and assuming that engineers are smarter than management and sales people, that observation makes no sense. :) You would expect to see extra tall engineers (because they need the extra brainpower) and shorter management and sales people.