Tall Men and Money

For "Blink," Gladwell polled about half of the Fortune 500 companies and found that the majority of their CEOs were tall, white men, and:

- The average CEO was just under 6 feet (the average American man is 5'9")

- Among the CEOs, 58 percent were 6 feet or over

- In the United States, 14.5 percent of men are 6 feet or over

- Some 30 percent of the CEOs were 6'2" or taller

- Only 3.9 percent of U.S. men are 6'2" or taller

"Height matters for career success," said Timothy Judge, a University of Florida management professor who co-conducted a study on the topic.

After analyzing the results of four large-scale studies, Judge and co-author Daniel Cable, a business professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel-Hill, found that extra inches could add up to thousands of dollars.

For each inch in height, a person earned about $789 more in pay. So a 6-foot person would earn $5,525 more each year than someone who is 5'5."

"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," Judge said.

Source: sixwise.com