Recently this topic has been discussed a lot and I have seen a lot of misconceptions. Thought that I will use statistics to clear things out.
The wikipedia page on average height all over the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height
Average female height in the tallest countries:
Belgium : 5ft 6 in.
Czech Republic : 5 ft 6 in.
Dinaric Alps : 5ft 7.5 in.
Lithuania : 5ft 6 in.
Norway : 5ft 6.5 in.
Netherlands : 5 ft 6.5 in.
There aren't any countries in this world where the average female height is 6 ft.
When it comes to things like height, salary, weight, SAT scores etc things follow what we call in statistics a Normal distribution:
![[Image: normal-distribution.gif]](http://orionwell.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/normal-distribution.gif)
I will use the example of SAT scores to make things simple. When I say that SAT scores follow a normal distribution curve and the mean is 1538 then the majority of the students will have scores that are around 1538. According the the picture above the approximately 70% of the students will have their score in the range of 1200-1800. Only 5% of the students will be in the outliers range and will either have a very low score of around 200 or a very high score of around 2200. And 1% or even less will have a perfect of 2400 or a low score below 200 or whatever.
This is how things work with height as well.When I look at the average female height of a country and its something around 5ft 6 then it is safe to assume that 60% of the women will be in the 5ft 3in to 5ft 9in range, 25-30% will be in the 5ft 1in -5ft 3in and 5ft 9in - 5ft 11in range and then you have the outliers - really short women below 5ft and really tall women above 6 ft that will make up 5% of the population. All these are assumptions but there are quite safe assumptions and more often than not hold true.
Sometimes the shape of the curve can be very narrow or broad.
![[Image: normal.png]](http://www.erm.ecs.soton.ac.uk/theme7/normal.png)
If its really narrow then its good news for short guys because then most of the women will be around the average height and if its a broad curve then the height distribution will be more uniform, instead of 70% of the women in the mid range you might have only 40%. But those are extreme cases and are not usually seen. I do not know which countries have narrow or broad curves.
Most of the there fallacies about height are created by locals who are proud of their country. If you are someone who is worried about going to country and being shorter than most of the women then you need not worry.
The wikipedia page on average height all over the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height
Average female height in the tallest countries:
Belgium : 5ft 6 in.
Czech Republic : 5 ft 6 in.
Dinaric Alps : 5ft 7.5 in.
Lithuania : 5ft 6 in.
Norway : 5ft 6.5 in.
Netherlands : 5 ft 6.5 in.
There aren't any countries in this world where the average female height is 6 ft.
When it comes to things like height, salary, weight, SAT scores etc things follow what we call in statistics a Normal distribution:
This is how things work with height as well.When I look at the average female height of a country and its something around 5ft 6 then it is safe to assume that 60% of the women will be in the 5ft 3in to 5ft 9in range, 25-30% will be in the 5ft 1in -5ft 3in and 5ft 9in - 5ft 11in range and then you have the outliers - really short women below 5ft and really tall women above 6 ft that will make up 5% of the population. All these are assumptions but there are quite safe assumptions and more often than not hold true.
Sometimes the shape of the curve can be very narrow or broad.
Most of the there fallacies about height are created by locals who are proud of their country. If you are someone who is worried about going to country and being shorter than most of the women then you need not worry.
