Tall people earn considerably more money throughout their lives than their shorter co-workers, with each inch (2.5 cm) adding about $789 a year in pay, according to a study.‘‘Height matters for career success,’’ said Timothy Judge, a University of Florida management professor, whose research will appear in the Spring issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology.‘‘These findings are troubling in the fact that, with a few exceptions such as professional basketball, no one could argue that height is an essential ability required for job performance nor a bona fide occupational qualification,’’ said Judge.Judge and Daniel Cable, a business professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel-Hill, analysed results of four large-scale studies in the US and Britain that followed thousands of participants from childhood to adulthood.Height boosted subjective ratings of work performance, including supervisors’ evaluations of how effective someone is on the job. The relationship was particularly strong in sales and management but was also present in occupations such as engineering, accounting and computer programming.
