Average Height in Uzbekistan (Men & Women)

How tall are people in Uzbekistan?

Men born in Uzbekistan in 1996 reach an average adult height of 169.4 cm (5′7″), and women 157.8 cm (5′2″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). Those are the reference values we use for Uzbekistan on this page, in our average height by country table and in the height comparison tool.

Out of the 200 countries and territories in our dataset, Uzbek men rank 118th and Uzbek women 132nd, a little below the middle of the world distribution in both cases. Men are 11.6 cm taller than women on average, close to the global gap of about 12 cm.

Uzbekistan is one of the few countries that the NCD-RisC researchers singled out by name in their analysis of the past century of human height, and the reason is the shape of its curve: steady growth for most of the 20th century, a plateau, and then a small step back for the youngest cohort in the series.

Reading a birth-cohort estimate

NCD-RisC's estimates describe people according to the year they were born rather than the year they were measured. The 1996 value is the expected average height at age 18 of people born in 1996. That is different from the average height of all adults in Uzbekistan, which includes grandparents born in the 1940s alongside young adults.

The collaboration built its estimates from 1,472 population-based studies with measured height on over 18.6 million people, covering 200 countries and birth years from 1896 to 1996. Only measured height was accepted, because self-reported height is biased upward. A statistical model combined the data, giving greater weight to nationally representative surveys, and used information from neighboring countries to fill gaps where national data were thin. The same estimates appear in an interactive chart on Our World in Data.

Uzbek height from 1896 to 1996

The fastest growth came early. Men born in 1926 were 5.6 cm taller than men born in 1896, and women gained 4.7 cm over the same three decades. The following thirty years added another 3.7 cm for men and 3.6 cm for women. By the 1956 cohort, Uzbek women had essentially reached the height they hold today.

From there the curve flattened. Men added only 0.4 cm between the 1956 and 1976 cohorts and women nothing at all. Then both sexes dipped by 1.4 cm for the 1996 cohort.

Central Asia's stalled generation

In discussing these trends, the NCD-RisC paper noted that after steady gains in most countries, height had recently stopped increasing or declined for men, though not women, in some Central Asian countries, giving Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan as examples. It contrasted these with countries such as Iran, where both sexes kept growing taller. The country-level series we publish shows the dip for both Uzbek men and women by the 1996 cohort, but the change is small relative to the uncertainty in the estimates, and the newer adolescent data discussed below suggest it has not persisted.

People in the 1996 cohort were small children in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The NCD-RisC study did not try to attribute Uzbekistan's plateau to specific causes, so we won't either, but the timing coincides with a period when child malnutrition in the country was high, as the survey data below show.

A gap between the sexes that barely moved

One feature of the Uzbek series is how stable the difference between men and women has been. Men were 10.2 cm taller than women in the 1896 cohort, 11.1 cm in 1926, 11.2 cm in 1956, 11.6 cm in 1976 and 11.6 cm in 1996. NCD-RisC found that, across the world, changes in men's and women's height over the century were correlated, and that by the 1996 cohort the male–female gap was roughly the same, about 12 cm, whether a country was tall or short. Uzbekistan fits that picture closely: whatever pushed average height up or held it back appears to have affected boys and girls in much the same way.

What Uzbekistan's surveys measured

The 2014 STEPS survey

Uzbekistan conducted a national survey of noncommunicable disease risk factors in 2014 using the World Health Organization's STEPS method, which includes physical measurements. As tabulated on Wikipedia's country height list, the survey measured 1,531 men and 2,161 women aged 18 to 64 and recorded average heights of about 169.6 cm for men and 157.0 cm for women.

That is very close to the NCD-RisC cohort figures, which is not surprising: the survey sampled adults of working age, whose birth years span roughly 1950 to 1996, the part of the curve where Uzbek height was almost flat. When average height changes little from one generation to the next, an all-ages survey and a single-cohort estimate converge.

The 1996 Demographic and Health Survey

An earlier source is the 1996 Uzbekistan Demographic and Health Survey, which measured women of reproductive age. Its final report states that the average height of women was 159 cm, and that about 1 percent were shorter than 145 cm, the threshold used to identify women at higher risk of complications in childbirth. Women aged 15 to 49 in 1996 were born between the late 1940s and the early 1980s, the cohorts at the top of the Uzbek curve, so a 159 cm average sits comfortably beside the NCD-RisC values of 159.2 cm for the 1956 and 1976 cohorts.

Child growth: from widespread stunting to rapid improvement

The same 1996 survey revealed a serious problem among young children. According to the DHS program's data, 34.9 percent of children under five were stunted, meaning they were too short for their age compared with international growth standards.

The joint UNICEF, WHO and World Bank estimates, published by the World Bank, show what happened next:

(The joint estimate for 1996 differs slightly from the DHS figure because the agencies reanalyse surveys to a common standard.)

A fall from more than a third of children to under a tenth within a generation is a dramatic improvement. Stunting in early childhood is closely tied to adult height, which is why NCD-RisC and others treat average height as a long-term record of child health. Uzbeks born in the mid-1990s, the last cohort in the adult series, grew up when stunting was at its peak. Children born in the 2010s and 2020s have grown up in very different conditions, and if the link holds, they should end up taller.

Are young Uzbeks taller?

The 2020 NCD-RisC analysis of school-age children and adolescents, published in The Lancet, provides an early look. Its country data estimate that 19-year-olds in Uzbekistan in 2019 averaged about 170.9 cm for young men and 160.3 cm for young women. In 1985, 19-year-olds averaged 169.8 cm and 159.0 cm.

Those numbers suggest that the dip in the adult cohort series was temporary and that the youngest adults are back at or slightly above the earlier peak. On this measure, young Uzbek men rank 126th of 200 countries and young women 109th.

The two NCD-RisC analyses are not interchangeable. The 2020 study used newer data, a different model designed for growth through childhood and adolescence, and estimated height at age 19 in a calendar year rather than at 18 for a birth year. The headline values on this page remain the 2016 adult cohort estimates, because they are available for every country on the same basis.

Uzbekistan and its Central Asian neighbors

Uzbekistan is the shortest of the former Soviet Central Asian republics in the 1996 cohort, though only by about 2 cm for men. Turkmen women stand out as tall for the region, 3.9 cm taller than Uzbek women. Afghanistan, on Uzbekistan's southern border, is about 4 cm shorter for men and 2.7 cm shorter for women.

Compared with Russia, where men born in 1996 average 176.5 cm and women 165.3 cm, the gap is substantial: 7.1 cm for men and 7.5 cm for women.

Regional differences within Uzbekistan

National averages hide variation inside the country. The 1996 DHS report noted that women in two of its survey regions, and those in rural areas, were more likely to have a low body mass index, a sign of undernutrition. Unfortunately, published national surveys do not provide average adult height by region, so we can't give reliable figures for, say, Tashkent compared with the Fergana Valley.

One region often discussed in health research is Karakalpakstan, the autonomous republic in the northwest that borders what was once the Aral Sea. The sea began shrinking in the 1960s and had largely dried up into desert by 2007. Whether and how that environmental change affected growth there is beyond what the height data on this page can show, and we haven't found a national source that publishes adult height for the region.

Putting the averages in perspective

An average describes the middle of a population, not a target for any individual. Plenty of Uzbek men are taller than 180 cm, and plenty of women are shorter than 150 cm. To see where a specific height falls, use the height percentile calculator, or convert 170 cm to feet and inches.

A few practical observations follow from the data:

• Generations are similar in height. Because the curve was nearly flat from the 1956 to the 1996 cohort, Uzbek parents and their adult children are, on average, almost the same height, unlike in countries such as South Korea where each generation was several centimeters taller than the last.
• Survey and model agree. The 2014 STEPS survey and the NCD-RisC estimate differ by less than a centimeter, which gives confidence in the numbers.
• The next generation should be taller. The collapse in child stunting since the late 1990s is the strongest predictor in the data that today's children will outgrow their parents.

If you have concerns about a child's growth, a pediatrician can track it on standard growth charts. For other countries, browse the full average height by country table.