Average Height in Peru (Men & Women)

Average height in Peru

Peruvian men born in 1996 reach an average adult height of 165.2 cm (5′5″), and Peruvian women 152.9 cm (5′0″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). These are the canonical figures for Peru on this site, in the height comparison tool and in the average height by country table.

Out of 200 countries and territories, Peruvian men rank 176th and Peruvian women 190th, which makes Peru the shortest country in South America for both sexes in this dataset. A 2020 genetics paper in Nature opened with the plain statement that Peruvians are among the shortest people in the world on average. Yet that's only half the story. Peru has also grown more than 10 cm taller over a century, its surveys show steep gaps in height by wealth and region, and it's where scientists found the common gene variant with the largest known effect on height.

How the estimates are built

NCD-RisC reports average height by birth cohort. The 1996 value is the expected height at age 18 of people born in 1996. Other kinds of data, such as a survey of all adults in a given year, mix several generations and are not directly comparable.

The 2016 NCD-RisC study drew on 1,472 population-based studies that measured the height of more than 18.6 million people, and covered birth years from 1896 to 1996 in 200 countries. It used only measured height, which avoids the upward bias of self-reports, and a statistical model that weighted national data more heavily than local surveys. Our World in Data publishes the same series as an interactive chart.

A century of growth from a very low base

Peruvians born at the end of the 19th century were among the shortest people anywhere. NCD-RisC found that the shortest populations in the 1896 cohort lived in Asia and in Central and Andean Latin America, and listed Peru among the countries with the shortest women after Guatemala, where women born in 1896 averaged just 140.3 cm. Peruvian women of that cohort averaged 141.5 cm, ranking 198th of 200 in our dataset.

Growth over the next sixty years was substantial. Women born in 1956 were 10.0 cm taller than those born in 1896, and men 8.6 cm taller. After that, gains slowed sharply, to 1.5 cm for men and 0.6 cm for women between the 1956 and 1976 cohorts. The 1996 cohort added a little more for women (0.8 cm) and very little for men (0.2 cm).

The gap between the sexes narrowed slightly over the century, from 13.4 cm in the 1896 cohort to 12.3 cm in 1996, because women gained more than men. That fits a broader NCD-RisC observation: a century ago the male–female gap tended to be slightly larger in poorly nourished populations, suggesting that boys had a relative advantage over girls where food was scarce, while by the 1996 cohort the gap was about the same everywhere.

The net result: Peruvians climbed from 194th to 176th place for men and from 198th to 190th for women. The NCD-RisC paper noted that height was still increasing in many Latin American countries, but Peru's late-century gains were modest compared with some neighbors.

What Peru's national surveys show

Peru has measured women's height in national health surveys since at least 1991–92. The Encuesta Demográfica y de Salud Familiar (ENDES), run by the national statistics institute INEI and long part of the international DHS program, measures the height of women of childbearing age.

Average height of women

The 2012 ENDES report found an average height of 152.3 cm for women aged 15 to 49, up slightly from 152.0 cm in the 2009 survey. That matches the NCD-RisC cohort figures closely: women aged 15 to 49 in 2012 were born between 1963 and 1997, a span over which the NCD-RisC cohort estimates sit between roughly 151.5 cm and 152.9 cm.

The survey also showed the generational shift within that age range. Young women aged 15 to 19 averaged 152.9 cm, while women aged 40 to 49 averaged 151.4 cm.

Short stature is falling

The share of women shorter than 145 cm, a threshold that health workers use to flag a higher risk of complications in childbirth, has fallen steadily:

Even so, almost one woman in ten was under 145 cm in 2012. For comparison, the equivalent share was about 1 percent or less in many African and North African DHS surveys of the same era, such as Ghana (1.2 percent in 2003) and Morocco (1.0 percent in 2003–04), which shows how unusual Peru's distribution of adult female height is.

Wealth, education and place

The ENDES 2012 report is unusually detailed about who is short and who is tall:

• Education: women with higher education averaged 154.4 cm, 6.0 cm taller than women with no schooling (148.4 cm), of whom 23.1 percent were under 145 cm.
• Wealth: women in the richest fifth of households averaged 155.0 cm, 5.1 cm more than those in the poorest fifth (149.9 cm).
• Urban and rural: urban women averaged 152.8 cm and rural women 150.5 cm.
• Natural region: women in Lima Metropolitana were tallest (153.4 cm) and those in the Andean Sierra shortest (151.2 cm).
• Department: Tacna and Moquegua had the tallest women (154.2 cm each), and Huancavelica the shortest (149.2 cm).

A 5 to 6 cm gap between the richest and poorest, or between the best and least educated, is large, roughly the same as the gap between Peru and Chile at the national level.

Child growth: big gains, lasting gaps

Childhood stunting, being too short for one's age compared with WHO growth standards, is the clearest early warning for adult height. Peru has made striking progress. In the DHS data, 37.1 percent of children under five were stunted in 1991–92, falling to 18.1 percent in 2012.

The 2012 figures also show the same geography as adult height: 31.9 percent of rural children were stunted compared with 10.5 percent of urban children; 47.5 percent in Huancavelica compared with 4.1 percent in Lima Metropolitana and 2.7 percent in Tacna. The departments where children were most often stunted in 2012 were largely the departments with the shortest adult women.

The FBN1 discovery: a genetic piece of the puzzle

Height differences between countries are usually explained by environment. NCD-RisC states that although height is highly heritable within populations, differences between populations are thought to arise mainly from non-genetic factors such as nutrition and infections. Peru adds an interesting twist.

A team led by researchers at Harvard and the Broad Institute, working with Peruvian partners including Socios En Salud and the Instituto Nacional de Salud, published a genome-wide study of an ethnically diverse group of Peruvians in Nature in 2020. Their key findings were:

• Native American ancestry was associated with reduced height in the group studied.
• A missense variant in the FBN1 gene, called E1297G, was significantly associated with lower height. FBN1 encodes fibrillin 1, a structural protein in connective tissue.
• Each copy of the less common version of the variant, carried at a frequency of 4.7 percent, reduced height by 2.2 cm, and by 4.4 cm in people with two copies. The authors described this as the largest effect size known for a common height-associated variant.
• The variant showed signs of positive selection and was more common in coastal Peruvian populations than in Andean or Amazonian ones, leading the authors to suggest that shorter stature might be an adaptation to factors linked to the coastal environment.

This doesn't mean genetics explains Peru's low ranking. A variant carried by fewer than 5 percent of alleles can only shift the national average by a fraction of a centimeter, while the survey gaps by wealth and education are 5 to 6 cm. But it's a rare, well-documented example of a single gene variant with a measurable effect on the height of a whole population.

Young Peruvians are taller

NCD-RisC's 2020 Lancet analysis of school-age children and adolescents gives a more recent view. Its country data estimate that 19-year-olds in Peru in 2019 averaged about 166.8 cm for young men and 154.4 cm for young women, up from 164.3 cm and 150.7 cm in 1985. That's a gain of 3.7 cm for young women in 34 years, faster than the late-century gains in the adult cohort series.

The two NCD-RisC analyses use different data and models, so the figures shouldn't be joined into one line. But they agree with the survey evidence: falling stunting, fewer very short women and taller teenagers all point to continued, if slow, growth.

Peru and its neighbors

Peru is the shortest country in South America in the 1996 cohort, though only by 1 to 2 cm compared with its Andean neighbors Bolivia and Ecuador. The gap to Chile, its southern neighbor, is 6.6 cm for men and 6.5 cm for women, and to Brazil 8.4 cm and 8.0 cm. Guatemala, where women born in 1996 are the shortest in the world at 149.4 cm, is the only Latin American country in this table shorter than Peru.

An older national source points the same way. Wikipedia's country height list cites a 2005 survey by Peru's Instituto Nacional de Salud that reported about 164 cm for men and 151 cm for women aged 20 and over, a little below the 1996-cohort values, as you'd expect from a sample that included older adults.

What it means in everyday terms

A 152.9 cm average means that in Peru, a woman of 160 cm is tall, while the same height would be close to average in Chile. To see where any height falls, use the height percentile calculator, or convert 165 cm to feet and inches.

National averages say nothing about whether an individual is healthy. If you're concerned about a child's growth, a pediatrician can assess it using standard growth charts.