The Mermaid's Tale: What’s True About the Evolution of Men’s Greater Average Height?
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Thursday, February 12, 2026
What’s True About the Evolution of Men’s Greater Average Height?
By
Holly Dunsworth
Over at ProSocial World's magazine This View of Life, I've got a piece that I'll paste here (though the formatting is better there). It's part of a series Sex, Gender Diversity & Evolution, with editors Joan Roughgarden, Justin Garcia, and Nathan Lents. Thanks to editor Eric Johnson for his stewardship of this piece.
What’s True About the Evolution of Men’s Greater Average Height?
Why men are taller than women may have nothing to do with testosterone—or sexual selection.
No matter where you are on this planet, human males are, on average, taller than human females. Sex-patterned differences in long bone length—specifically the tibia and femur (a.k.a. the shinbone and thighbone)—explain those height differences. Slight differences in skull size, vertebral thickness, and heel height add to height differences, as well. Our great ape relatives share our pattern. Chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, and orangutan males are bigger boned than females, though the degree of the sex difference varies by species. So, men’s greater average height is best understood through an evolutionary perspective. But how we might reasonably apply an evolutionary perspective to this phenomenon may come as a surprise to most readers. Not to be annoyingly coy, but let’s just say that the answer to the question about sex differences in height that you’re probably thinking of might not be up to 2025 snuff.<br>Back in 1871, Darwin fleshed out his idea of "sexual selection" with "the strongest and boldest men… in contests for wives".1 Since then, competitive, dominant males winning the most mating bouts with choosy females, and creating more competitive dominant males in the process, has become the prevailing answer to the question of sex differences in size, including height. And it seems to be the preferred explanation for all sex differences. Evolutionary psychology being the popular, mainstream perspective on human evolution has certainly helped with that.<br>According to leading evolutionary psychologist David Buss, "sex differences in reproductive biology have created selection pressures for sex differences in sexual psychology that are often comparable in degree to sex differences in height, weight, upper-body muscle mass, body-fat distribution, testosterone levels, and estrogen production."2 It seems the only way to apply sexual selection to human evolution is to assume distinct, evolved male and female psyches. In this popular paradigm,3 masculinity and femininity seem to be as inherited as curly hair. And so, it’s those essences, roles, or personas, if you will, of Man and Wife, that caused human height differences and whose very existence is evidenced by the fact that men are, on average, taller than women.<br>But Darwin’s Descent of Man came before much was known about bone growth biology, and even predated the word "hormone".4 So what is the current understanding of bone growth and its sex-patterned variation?<br>Because height is an important part of what makes a man a man in American culture (and countless others around the world), and because testosterone is too, it’s taken for granted that men’s height is caused by testosterone. The most recent high-profile example I’ve seen is Scott Galloway’s book Notes on Being a Man.5 I have only listened to the audio version, so I do not know if he provided references. Though I doubt he included any for testosterone and male height. Why should he? He’s just talking common sense, even among many scientists.6 But is common sense correct? Is testosterone the reason that men are taller than women?<br>No. For all we know—which isn’t everything, but isn’t nothing, either—testosterone is not part of the reason that men are, on average, taller than women. And that causes problems for the sexual selection explanation and, by extension, some basic assumptions in evolutionary psychology. Before we reckon with that, let’s look at the actual facts of long bone growth.<br>Kids grow their bones like kids until puberty, at which point sex differences set in, and females stop growing sooner than males do. In the U.S., after nearly the same growth trajectory from two years of age, both males and females at 13 years are roughly 5’2" (or 157 cm) tall. After that, the female growth curve flattens out to reach the average final height of about 5’4" (163 cm). In males, the growth curve continues on roughly the same trajectory as childhood, for at least 1.5 more years, until it eventually flattens out to reach the average final height of about 5’10" (178 cm). This is an additional 9% of growth in males compared to females.7 What causes it?<br>Continued male growth at puberty, past the point when females stop, is due to estrogen’s effects on all human...