What does it mean for height to be a social construct? Height as it happens in the world happens through the lenses that we see each other.

I'm moving through the world and I see people in the world and I have some rough idea of how tall they are, and it turns out that that is not always completely accurate. How we judge how tall someone is is influenced by whether they're male or female. For example, these folks took a whole bunch of pictures of people standing next to common reference objects. And they found that the men, they overestimated the height of the men and they underestimated the height of the women.

The point here is that awareness that the people had who were doing the judging; their awareness of gendered height differences caused them to evaluate the actual height of actual people differently. That is, their ideologies, their beliefs about who is tall, and who is not tall, actually made their experience of height in the world, which is actually the one that matters, made that different. That's one of the things we mean by a social construct.

The fact that we have beliefs about how we should be in the world, the fact that our beliefs about what is true of the world changes what we think about how we should be in the world, actually changes the data we receive as we move through the world. As I walk through the world I see things and I draw conclusions based on them. And our beliefs about what the world should be like influences what I see because the further we are from norms often, though not always, the more we take steps to try to be more like those norms. So for example, heterosexual couples pair up overwhelmingly with taller men and shorter women. By chance you would expect about 2% of couples to have taller women and shorter men. In the Gillis and Avis study in 1980 they found one such couple out of 720.