This is an OkTrends micro-post: weird, interesting, or provocative stuff that we've found in the online dating data mines.

Looking for some trends to write longer posts about, we stumbled upon a remarkable fact. Extremely short and extremely tall men seem to be much more likely to be gay or bisexual:

This effect is most pronounced with especially short men. A guy in the 5th percentile by height (shorter than 5′ 5″) is 70% more likely to be queer than a man of average height (5′ 10″). a man in the 5th percentile by height is 70% more likely to be gay or bi than a man of average height We have no idea why this is. If queerness is genetic, then perhaps its determinant gene or genes sits near the genes that determine height? I looked around and could find no medical study investigating the correlation. Any geneticists out there?

Anyhow, here are a few baseline facts about our sample population: 10.1% of our male users describe themselves as gay or bisexual. 90% of the men OkCupid are between 5′ 5″ and 6′ 3″. Of course, height is self-reported, but we’ve found, surprisingly enough, that men seem to be pretty honest about it. The curve below, for the dataset we used for this here micro-post, is very similar to the latest National Health Statistics Report published by the CDC.

An upcoming big blog post will investigate exactly how much people lie in their profiles, but it seems at first blush that men are relatively honest about how tall they are. I guess it’d be a hard lie to get away with if you ever meet someone in person.

We’ll post the corresponding chart for women tomorrow.