Average Height in Chile (Men & Women)

How tall are Chileans?

The site's figures for Chile come from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), which estimates that Chileans born in 1996 average 171.8 cm (5′7.5″) for men and 159.4 cm (5′3″) for women. In the site's table of 200 countries and territories, Chilean men rank 93rd and Chilean women 90th, both near the middle of the world.

What makes Chile interesting isn't where it ranks today but how it got there. Chileans gained more than 11 cm over the twentieth century and were still growing at the end of it. Chilean researchers have studied that growth closely, and their findings point to an unusually clear cause: the collapse of infant mortality, driven by public health policy, rather than income growth alone.

This article covers the estimates, a century of change, what Chilean research says about why heights rose, inequality in height past and present, and how Chile compares with its neighbors.

How the estimates work

Chile is one of the countries that contributed its own measurements: researchers from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile are listed among the study's collaborating members. Like every NCD-RisC estimate, the Chilean series excludes self-reported heights, and it shows unbroken growth, from 160.7 cm for men born in 1896 to 171.8 cm for men born in 1996.

The averages describe birth cohorts, people born in a given year, at about age 18. Each country's estimate came from a Bayesian hierarchical model informed by the country's own surveys and by data from other years and nearby countries in its region. Chile was also one of 62 countries used to study the link between height gains and adult mortality, chosen because their death registration was more than 80% complete.

A century of growth

Over the century, Chilean men gained 11.1 cm and women 11.8 cm, more than the 8 to 9 cm global gain reported by Our World in Data. The growth was steady, about 4 cm per 30-year step up to the 1956 cohort, and still clearly positive at the end: women added 1.7 cm between the 1976 and 1996 cohorts and men 1.1 cm.

That fits the NCD-RisC paper's observation that height is still increasing in many countries in Latin America, in contrast to the plateau in much of Northern Europe and the English-speaking world. Chilean women in particular haven't stopped gaining.

Why Chileans grew taller

Infant mortality, not income

The most striking finding comes from a 2019 study in Economics and Human Biology by Francisca Borrescio-Higa, Carlos Bozzoli and Federico Droller. They used cohort and regional data for Chileans born between 1960 and 1989, and related adult height to the disease environment in the first year of life, measured by the infant mortality rate.

• Over those thirty years, infant mortality fell by about 100 points, from 119.4 to 21.0 deaths per 1,000 births.
• Adult height rose by 0.96 cm per decade of birth.
• The drop in infant mortality explained almost all of the long-term rise in adult height.
• Income per person had no predictive power once infant mortality was accounted for.

The results held after allowing for regional and cohort differences, internal migration and urbanization. The authors concluded that the gains point to the long-term effect of a public health policy. In other words, Chileans grew taller mainly because fewer babies and children were sick, not simply because the country got richer.

Their estimate of about 1 cm per decade lines up with the NCD-RisC series: Chilean men gained 2.1 cm between the 1956 and 1976 cohorts, and women 2.0 cm.

Children's height in the 1980s and 1990s

A 2004 study in the journal Nutrition by Santiago Muzzo and colleagues tracked schoolchildren between 1986 and 1998 and found dramatic falls in short stature, defined as height for age below the 10th percentile:

Over the same years, obesity rose steeply in every group, from 4.3% to 29.5% among prepubertal boys, for example. The authors described Chile as a special model of fast change in nutrition and growth, driven by social and political interventions and economic development, and warned of the need both to curb obesity and to keep reducing short stature.

Stunting almost eliminated

The World Bank's series for Chile shows how rare stunting in young children became:

By 2014, fewer than one child in fifty was stunted. If the link between early-life health and adult height found by Chilean researchers holds, children growing up in these conditions may become taller adults than the 1996 cohort.

Height and inequality in Chile

The nitrate era

Chile's height history also records its social divisions. A 2020 study by Manuel Llorca-Jaña and colleagues analyzed records of more than 20,000 male inmates of Santiago's main prison during the nitrate era, roughly the 1880s to the 1930s. For men aged 20 to 55 born between 1882 and 1934, the raw average height was about 167 cm, the same as in military records for the period.

Within that population, height tracked social position:

• Inmates with a university degree were taller than the rest.
• Men born legitimate were taller in adulthood, by a raw difference of 0.6 cm.
• Those who could read and write were taller than illiterate inmates.
• Chilean-born men with Northern European surnames were taller than others, and in particular taller than those with Mapuche surnames.

The study also found height stagnating for men born from the 1880s to the 1910s and declining slightly in the 1920s and 1930s, consistent with earlier research on Chilean height trends. The authors note that prison samples tend to over-represent poorer groups and urban Santiago, so the average likely sits a little below the national one.

Narrowing gaps

The same paper reviews other Chilean evidence. Earlier research on boys found differences of 9 to 11 cm between socioeconomic groups up to the late 1940s, narrowing substantially after the 1930s to about 5 cm by the 1990s. A study of urban workers born between the 1960s and 1990s found those with university degrees were 3 to 5 cm taller than those with only primary education, depending on decade of birth.

Men, women and gender equality

A 2021 study in the Journal of Biosocial Science by Héctor Castellucci and colleagues looked at the difference between male and female height, known as sexual height dimorphism, in four samples of working-age Chileans born between 1955 and 1995. It found that the shrinking difference was strongly associated with greater gender equality and with general welfare indicators such as the infant mortality rate, but not with income per person. The authors concluded that the gender gap in Chile had narrowed, visible in both equality indicators and height, mainly in areas linked to women's health.

The NCD-RisC data show the same narrowing. Chilean men were 13.1 cm taller than women in the 1896 cohort and 12.4 cm taller in the 1996 cohort. Chilean women gained 0.7 cm more than men over the century, and 0.6 cm more in the last twenty years alone.

What taller generations mean for health

Chile's data connect height to health in two directions. The Chilean studies above show that better infant and child health produced taller adults. The NCD-RisC paper looks at the other side: across 62 countries with reliable death registration, Chile among them, cohorts whose height rose more also saw larger falls in the probability of dying between ages 50 and 70, with correlations of −0.58 for men and −0.68 for women among cohorts born between 1898 and 1946.

The authors present this as evidence of the large impact that height gains have had on population health and longevity; it describes populations, not a guarantee for any individual. The paper also notes that taller adult height is associated with lower risk of cardiovascular and respiratory disease, and with higher risk of some cancers. For Chile, whose falling infant mortality appears to have driven most of its height gain, the two trends tell essentially the same story from different ends of life.

Chile and its neighbors

NCD-RisC estimates for Chile and other South American countries (1996 birth cohort):

Chilean men are 2.8 cm shorter than Argentine men, but Chilean women are slightly taller than Argentine women. Chile is 5 to 7 cm taller than its northern neighbors Bolivia and Peru for both sexes. The NCD-RisC paper notes that people born in 1896 were among the shortest in the world in Central and Andean Latin America, and Chile's century of steady gains has carried it well clear of the Andean averages.

Chile and Argentina: women overtake

The century-long comparison with Argentina shows an unusual crossover:

Argentine men have stayed 1.6 to 3.0 cm ahead of Chilean men throughout. Among women, Argentines led by 3 cm for most of the century, but Argentine women's height leveled off after the 1976 cohort and even dipped slightly, while Chilean women kept gaining. By the 1996 cohort, Chilean women had drawn level and edged ahead. It's a small change in absolute terms, but it fits the Chilean research showing that women's health gains have narrowed the gap between the sexes.

Using these numbers

An average Chilean man born in 1996 stands 171.8 cm, about 5′7.5″, just above the global male average of 171 cm reported by Our World in Data. An average Chilean woman, at 159.4 cm, is about 5′3″, essentially at the global female average of 159 cm.

To compare an individual height with these averages, use the height percentile calculator, or convert on the cm to feet page for 173 cm. The average height hub compares every country.

Chile's height record is a public health story as much as an economic one. Its people grew more than 11 cm taller over a century, social gaps in height narrowed, the difference between men and women shrank, and child stunting fell below 2%. Chilean research suggests that keeping infants and children healthy did more than income alone to make each generation taller.