Average Height in France (Men & Women)

Average height in France

French adults born in 1996 average 179.7 cm (5′11″) for men and 164.9 cm (5′5″) for women, according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). Those are the figures used on this page and in the site's comparison tools. French men rank around 13th of 200 countries, among the tallest in the world, and French women around 25th.

France also has one of the longest height records anywhere, reaching back to men born in the 1660s, and a tradition of official surveys that asked the French about their height and weight. This page brings those sources together, from the 17th century to the 1996 cohort.

Where the NCD-RisC figures come from

NCD-RisC reanalyzed 1,472 population-based studies with measured heights for more than 18.6 million people in 200 countries. French collaborators included researchers in Lille, Strasbourg and Toulouse, among others. The study used only measured heights and excluded self-reports, which its authors call the single most important source of bias in adult height data.

The model estimates average height for every birth year from 1896 to 1996, adjusting for height lost with age. The 1996 figure therefore describes French people who turned 18 around 2014. It isn't the average of all adults living in France today, which would be lower because older generations are shorter.

A century of growth in France

French men gained 13.3 cm over the century and women 9.6 cm. The pace picked up in the middle of the century. Men added 3.8 cm between the 1896 and 1926 cohorts and 4.8 cm between 1926 and 1956. Then they added another 3 cm by the 1976 cohort.

France stands out for how late the gains continued. Between the 1976 and 1996 cohorts, French men still gained 1.7 cm. Over the same period, British men gained nothing and American men lost 0.4 cm. In the year-by-year NCD-RisC series published by Our World in Data, both French men and French women were at their tallest in the final 1996 cohort.

Women's gains slowed sooner. French women gained only 0.5 cm between the 1976 and 1996 cohorts. Because men kept growing, the gap between the sexes widened from 11.1 cm in the 1896 cohort to 14.8 cm in the 1996 cohort, the sixth largest of 41 European countries in the site's data.

Four centuries of French men

Our World in Data publishes reconstructions of men's heights by birth decade compiled by Joerg Baten and Matthias Blum for the Clio-Infra project. For France the series starts in the 1660s.

The series shows that French men born in the late 17th century were short, at about 161 to 163 cm. Men born in the 1740s reached about 167 cm, a height not matched again until men born in the early 20th century. Men born in the 1810s to 1840s were back down to about 164 cm.

From the mid-19th century, heights rose slowly but almost without interruption: about 1.6 cm over the five birth decades from the 1850s to the 1900s, then faster. Men born in the 1940s were 5 cm taller than men born in the 1900s, and men born in the 1980s were about 10 cm taller than those born in the 1900s. The NCD-RisC paper notes that long-run trends in men's height in Europe have been reconstructed for up to 250 years from records of conscripts, soldiers and convicts.

What the French said about their height in 1970

Long before NCD-RisC, France's statistics institute INSEE asked about height in its surveys on health and medical consumption in 1970 and 1980. Alain Charraud and Hélène Valdelièvre analyzed the 1970 answers in Économie et Statistique in 1981, in an article titled "La taille et le poids des Français" (The height and weight of the French).

Their main findings:

• French men reported an average height of 1.70 m and weight of 72 kg. Women reported 1.60 m and 60 kg.
• Men were on average 10 cm taller and 11 kg heavier than women.
• Retired people and students were at opposite ends of the height scale, partly because younger generations had grown taller.
• Once age and height were taken into account, managers (cadres) weighed less than office and manual workers.
• About a quarter of adults were at least 20 percent above the "ideal weight" defined by the Lorentz formula, yet only 1 percent of men and 3 percent of women said they were on a diet.

The authors were candid about the data's limits. Heights and weights weren't measured, and respondents often rounded their answers. The survey showed two artificial peaks, at 1.60 m and 60 kg for women and at 1.70 m and 70 kg for men. That kind of heaping is a classic problem with self-reported data, and it's one reason later research, including NCD-RisC, relies on measured heights.

Even allowing for rounding, the 1970 figures give a useful snapshot. They describe all French adults at the time, including people born in the 1890s, so they sit well below NCD-RisC's estimates for later cohorts.

Height, couples and careers: the 2003 INSEE study

In 2003 Nicolas Herpin of INSEE and the CNRS published a study in Économie et Statistique on how men's height relates to their personal and working lives. Its abstract summarizes several findings:

• Couples: shorter men were less likely to live in a couple. The effect was about as strong among manual workers as among managers, even though manual workers were on average shorter than managers.
• Careers: at the same level of education, taller men had better careers, because they were given more supervisory responsibility.
• Social norms: Herpin argues that height isn't only valued as a sign of future earnings when couples form. A social norm favoring physically matched couples is harder for short men to satisfy.

The study shows that height in France isn't only a health statistic. It also carries social meaning. To see what different height differences between partners look like, try the height difference calculator.

France compared with its neighbors

French men are almost exactly as tall as German men and about 2 cm shorter than Belgian men. They're taller than men in every other neighboring country in the table, about 2 cm taller than Italian and British men and 3.1 cm taller than Spanish men. French women are less far ahead: they're 1 cm shorter than German women and only 0.3 to 0.5 cm taller than women in Italy and the UK.

A century ago the order was a little different. French men born in 1896 (166.4 cm) were shorter than German men (167.2 cm) and Swiss men (167.5 cm) and the same height as Irish men. France's late, sustained growth moved it up the European table.

How France moved up the table

The NCD-RisC cohorts show exactly when France caught up with its taller neighbors.

In the 1956 cohort, French men were still slightly shorter than British, Swiss and German men. By the 1976 cohort they had passed British and Swiss men, and by 1996 they had nearly closed the gap with German men, 0.2 cm behind after being 2.1 cm behind in 1956. The difference came from timing. British and Swiss men's heights leveled off for those born after the 1970s, while French men kept gaining.

Italy and Spain started much lower and gained more over the century, 13.1 cm and 14.3 cm, but they hadn't caught France by 1996.

French women: smaller gains, smaller climb

French women's story is quieter. They ranked around 32nd of 200 countries in the 1896 cohort and around 25th in 1996, a smaller move than the men's climb from around 42nd to around 13th. Their total gain of 9.6 cm was one of the smallest among their western European neighbors: German women gained 9.9 cm, British women 11 cm, Italian women 11.1 cm and Spanish women 12.3 cm. Swiss women, at 6 cm, gained less.

The result is that French women born in 1996 are close to the western European middle, while French men are near the top. That's the reason for France's relatively wide 14.8 cm gap between the sexes.

French heights in practice

A young French man is typically about 180 cm (5′11″), and the 180 cm page shows that height in feet and inches alongside averages from other countries. The footballer Kylian Mbappé, listed at 178 cm, is close to that average. A young French woman is typically about 165 cm (5′5″). To see how any height compares, try the height percentile calculator.

It's tempting to compare the 1970 INSEE averages with today's figures and conclude that the French grew about 10 cm taller in a generation. That overstates the change. The 1970 numbers were self-reported and rounded, and they averaged every adult alive at the time, from people born in the 1890s to those born in the early 1950s. The NCD-RisC figures are measured and describe a single birth year. A fairer comparison uses cohorts within the NCD-RisC series itself. In the year-by-year data published by Our World in Data, French men born in 1946, who were young adults around 1970, averaged about 173.3 cm and women about 161.2 cm. The gain to the 1996 cohort is therefore about 6.5 cm for men and 3.7 cm for women: substantial, but well short of ten.