Average Height in Bangladesh (Men & Women)

Bangladesh's average height

Bangladeshi men born in 1996 reach an average adult height of 163.8 cm (5′4″), and Bangladeshi women 150.8 cm (4′11″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). Its 2016 study combined 1,472 population-based measurement studies, covering more than 18.6 million people, to estimate adult height for every birth year from 1896 to 1996 in 200 countries.

Bangladesh is among the shortest countries in that dataset. Its men rank 185th of 200. Its women rank 198th, ahead of only the Philippines and Guatemala. The NCD-RisC paper specifically names Bangladesh, along with the Philippines and Nepal, as a country where women born in 1996 average less than 151 cm.

The site's 164 cm page shows roughly how tall the average Bangladeshi man is, and the 150 cm page is within a centimeter of the average Bangladeshi woman.

Reading a birth-cohort average

NCD-RisC's numbers describe a birth cohort at age 18: the expected adult height of people born in a particular year. The 1996 cohort is the most recent. The figure is not a census of today's adults, many of whom were born decades earlier into poorer conditions. NCD-RisC used only surveys that measured height rather than asking for it, drew on representative samples of the general population, and used a Bayesian model to combine surveys and fill gaps.

For Bangladesh, cohort figures reveal a pattern that a simple average would hide. Women's height has risen much faster than men's over the century, and the national survey also suggests that younger women are taller than older women.

A century of change: women gained most

Bangladeshi women gained 9.3 cm over the century and men 5.2 cm. Almost all of that gain happened in cohorts born before the mid-1950s. In 1896, Bangladeshi women averaged just 141.5 cm, and NCD-RisC lists Bangladesh among the countries with the shortest women of that generation, after Guatemala, El Salvador and Peru and alongside South Korea and Japan. In those early cohorts, the gap between men and women was a striking 17.1 cm. By 1996 it had narrowed to 13.0 cm.

After the 1950s cohorts, progress stopped. Men born in 1996 are 0.3 cm shorter than men born in 1976, and women 0.5 cm shorter. NCD-RisC describes the rise in adult height as having plateaued in South Asian countries like Bangladesh and India at levels 5–10 cm below where Japan and South Korea leveled off. South Korea and Japan started from a similar point to Bangladesh for women born in 1896, but their women born in 1996 are 11.5 cm and 7.5 cm taller, respectively.

What the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey shows

Bangladesh's main source of measured height is the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS), run by the National Institute of Population Research and Training (NIPORT) with technical assistance from ICF through the DHS program. The 2017–18 BDHS measured the height and weight of ever-married women aged 15–49, the group used for comparisons with earlier rounds. The report notes that it also measured never-married women aged 18 and over and older ever-married women, but kept the main tables to the traditional group for consistency.

Like other DHS surveys, the BDHS reports the share of women with short stature, defined as under 145 cm, rather than a mean height. Nationally, 13.7% of the 19,776 women in the analysis fell below that line. For comparison, India's NFHS-5 found 11.5%, Pakistan's 2017–18 PDHS 5.0% and Nigeria's 2018 NDHS 1.4%.

Signs of generational progress

The age pattern is encouraging. Women in their forties were the most likely to be under 145 cm (16.6%), and teenagers the least likely (10.7%). All of these women are under 50, so most of that difference is likely to reflect improvements between generations rather than age-related shrinking. Women in their twenties, born around the late 1980s and 1990s, are less likely to be very short than their mothers' generation. The improvement looks modest in NCD-RisC's national averages, but it shows up clearly at the short end of the distribution.

Education and wealth matter even more than age. Women with no schooling were almost two and a half times as likely to be under 145 cm (19.9%) as women who had completed secondary school (8.2%).

Differences between divisions

The BDHS also reports short stature for each of Bangladesh's eight divisions.

The northern divisions of Rangpur, Mymensingh and Rajshahi have the most short women. Khulna and Chattogram have the fewest. The range from 10% to 17% is narrower than India's state-to-state range, which runs from under 5% to over 18%.

Overweight is rising alongside short stature

The same survey shows that weight and height do not move together. While 13.7% of women were under 145 cm, 32% were overweight or obese and only 12% thin, with a mean BMI of 23.3. Overweight was far more common in urban areas (43%) than rural ones (28%) and in the richest quintile (54%) than the poorest (16%). The shift has been fast. The BDHS shows the share of thin women falling from 52% in 1996–97 to 30% in 2007 and 12% in 2017–18, while the share who are overweight or obese rose from 3% to 12% to 32% over the same rounds. Bangladesh now has many adult women who are short, a legacy of their own childhood, and also overweight, a reflection of how diets have changed since.

Men in the survey

The 2017–18 round also measured men aged 18 and older. The report focuses on their body-mass index rather than height. It found 20% of men thin and 18% overweight or obese, with a mean BMI of 21.6, noticeably lower than women's 23.3. So in Bangladesh, men are more likely than women to be underweight, while women are more likely to be overweight.

Why women's height matters for the next generation

The NCD-RisC authors stress that women's height has consequences beyond the individual. They summarize evidence that short maternal stature raises the risk of babies being born small for gestational age and of preterm birth, both risk factors for newborn deaths, as well as the risk of complications in pregnancy. They conclude that whether women's height improves or stagnates can influence trends in infant and maternal mortality.

That gives Bangladesh's figures extra weight. With one in seven women under 145 cm, and the average woman born in 1996 at 150.8 cm, the gains in girls' growth that the stunting data now show are an investment in the health of their future children as well as in their own height.

The child stunting revolution

Bangladesh's biggest nutrition story is the fall in child stunting, children under five who are too short for their age. WHO and UNICEF survey estimates compiled by Our World in Data show one of the steepest declines anywhere:

The 2017–18 BDHS reported stunting at 31%, down from 43% in 2007, and noted the government's aim, under its fourth health, population and nutrition sector program, of reducing it to 25% by 2022. The latest estimate of 23.6% suggests that target was met. Inequalities remain large. Stunting was 43% in Sylhet and 26% in Dhaka and Khulna, 33% in rural areas versus 25% in cities, 40% in the poorest quintile versus 17% in the richest, and 43% among children of mothers with no education versus 18% among children of mothers with secondary education or more.

This matters because adult height lags behind childhood conditions by about 18 years. The adults in NCD-RisC's 1996 cohort grew up when roughly two-thirds of young children in Bangladesh were stunted. Today's children grow up with less than a quarter stunted. If the link between childhood growth and adult height holds, Bangladeshis born in the 2010s and 2020s should end up noticeably taller than the 1996 cohort.

Why Bangladeshis are short

Our World in Data's review of the evidence identifies nutrition and childhood disease as the main drivers of differences in average height between populations. It singles out Bangladesh as an example of a country where diets depend heavily on rice and other cereals, which limits dietary diversity. It also notes that animal-source proteins such as milk and eggs are of much higher quality than rice or wheat protein. Since genes change only slowly, the speed of Bangladesh's recent improvement in child growth suggests that living conditions, not ancestry, explain most of the gap with taller countries.

Bangladesh among its neighbors

Bangladeshis are close in height to their neighbors but at the short end of the group. Indian men are 1.1 cm taller and Indian women 1.8 cm taller. Women in Myanmar, Bangladesh's other land neighbor, are 3.6 cm taller. Only Nepal is similar, with men 1.5 cm shorter and women of almost identical height. Compare any two countries on the average height by country hub.

What the averages mean day to day

For Bangladeshis, the useful benchmarks are about 164 cm (5′4″) for men and 151 cm (4′11″) for women born in the 1990s. A woman of 157 cm or a man of 170 cm is clearly tall by national standards. To compare a specific height with reference data, try the height percentile calculator. For Bangladesh, the most interesting numbers to watch are not today's adult averages but the stunting rates among young children, because they are the best early signal of how tall the next generation of Bangladeshi adults will be.