The number obtained when the height of a male is divided by the height of a female, is called the sexual dimorphism ratio (SDR).
When this number is greater than 1.
0, the male is taller than the female.
Since men tend to be 8 percent taller than women, the average SDR is 1.
08.
Straight forward, right? What would be a boring number gains a lot of interest when it is related to the dating preferences of women and men.
It turns out, dating preference for both genders has a lot to do with SDR.
Men were found to have a preference for an SDR of 1.
09, very close to the average, whereas women overall favored 1.
14 which is far above the norm.
This means that women overall prefer men 14 percent taller than themselves.
In other words, a woman who is 5 foot 4 inches would fancy men almost 6 foot 1 inch in height.
This is not where it ends.
Studies were performed on different height groups of women.
The results show that the taller the woman, the more her SDR drops, while the shorter the woman, the more her SDR increases.
There were some very tall women who preferred men their own height or even shorter, while some shorter women's preferred SDR rose to 1.
19, meaning they wanted to meet men 19 percent taller than themselves.
If a 5 foot 1 inch tall woman has an SDR of 1.
19, she strongly prefers dating men taller than 6 feet.
This is not true of all 5 foot 1 inch tall women.
If a woman of that height joined a dating service and decided that she would be happy to meet a guy just a few inches taller, she would have a huge pool of great men available to her.
Five foot one inch women who insist on being matched with men over 6 feet tall tend to have uneventful relationship lives and suffer from excessive "singleitis".
As for those who do not have such expectations, they wind up living happily ever after having met a wonderful man of any height.
Women who are willing to meet men their own height or shorter are tall women, usually 5 foot 8 inches or taller.
Such women tend to be flexible in terms of a man's height because their experience of being tall dates back to their elementary school years.
Girls grow more rapidly than boys and tend to stay taller from Grade 6, right through middle school.
The boys are usually taller by the time students finish high school though.
Growth hormones called androgens are released in girls before they are released in boys during puberty.
A taller height can be particularly distressing for girls during that period of adolescence when nobody wants to appear different.
This explains why so many tall women are not fastidious about dating only taller men.
A 6-foot 3-inch woman shared her individual dating experiences as an adult: "There are many guys who seem frightened, but I view this as a filter to get rid of guys I don't want to be with anyway.
There are also guys with a fixation on tall women and they are also to be avoided, but you can easily figure them out - all they do is talk about your height, check out your hand size, ask about shoes, etc.
Pretty weird.
Then again there are the good guys who just don't see height and make excellent boyfriends.
All of my boyfriends have been shorter than me it turns out.
" The moral of this article, and SDR, is that if you are single and in search for that great boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or spouse, consider checking out some of those short men and very tall women that you excluded in the past.