Drew
04-14-2010, 07:11 PM
You'll have to visit the site to see the graphs:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/women-lie-about-height/
As we promised at the end of yesterday’s post showing that shorter men are more likely to be gay, here are the height & queerness data for women.
The correlation isn’t nearly as pronounced:
But there is still a visible trend: very short and very tall women are the most likely to be gay or bisexual. Unsurprisingly, I’m no closer than I was yesterday to knowing why height and sexual preference would be related. A couple readers and my data-mining colleague, James, have speculated that people at the extreme ends of the height spectrum are probably more likely to be sexually frustrated and that that frustration in turn leads people to come to grips with their sexuality more fully. However, that’s shading into the question of whether gayness is genetic or environmentally inspired, and obviously this blog isn’t qualified to pronounce on that.
In investigating the female have of this gayness/height comparison, we did find something very interesting that has nothing to do with sex. Below is the height distribution of our sample pool of women users. Unlike the equivalent chart for men, which was a very nice bell curve (as it should be), this curve has a weird hitch at 4′ 10″. I’ve highlighted the hitch below.
This anomaly means there’s some lying going on, because the true population curve definitely does not have a weird jump. Here’s the graph of how it should look:
It seems like women shorter than 4′ 10″ are rounding up to 4′ 10″ or 4′ 11″ (but not to 5′ 0″, which is strange…maybe that seems like too much of a lie?) Anyhow, given that men are the people we’d naturally suspect of fudging their height upward, it’s interesting that we see this trend with women instead.
Yesterday’s post is here, if you want compare the charts. Though men don’t seemingly lie about their height, the queerness/height correlation is much more pronounced.
Thoughts?
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/women-lie-about-height/
As we promised at the end of yesterday’s post showing that shorter men are more likely to be gay, here are the height & queerness data for women.
The correlation isn’t nearly as pronounced:
But there is still a visible trend: very short and very tall women are the most likely to be gay or bisexual. Unsurprisingly, I’m no closer than I was yesterday to knowing why height and sexual preference would be related. A couple readers and my data-mining colleague, James, have speculated that people at the extreme ends of the height spectrum are probably more likely to be sexually frustrated and that that frustration in turn leads people to come to grips with their sexuality more fully. However, that’s shading into the question of whether gayness is genetic or environmentally inspired, and obviously this blog isn’t qualified to pronounce on that.
In investigating the female have of this gayness/height comparison, we did find something very interesting that has nothing to do with sex. Below is the height distribution of our sample pool of women users. Unlike the equivalent chart for men, which was a very nice bell curve (as it should be), this curve has a weird hitch at 4′ 10″. I’ve highlighted the hitch below.
This anomaly means there’s some lying going on, because the true population curve definitely does not have a weird jump. Here’s the graph of how it should look:
It seems like women shorter than 4′ 10″ are rounding up to 4′ 10″ or 4′ 11″ (but not to 5′ 0″, which is strange…maybe that seems like too much of a lie?) Anyhow, given that men are the people we’d naturally suspect of fudging their height upward, it’s interesting that we see this trend with women instead.
Yesterday’s post is here, if you want compare the charts. Though men don’t seemingly lie about their height, the queerness/height correlation is much more pronounced.
Thoughts?