High heels affect how men treat women, study finds

Marilyn Monroe said if you give a girl the right shoes, she can conquer the world.

Jack Handey said before you criticise someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes, and that way, when you criticise them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.

We digress.

A French study into the power of the high-heeled shoe has found that men behave very differently to women sporting a pair.


Scientists from the Université de Bretagne-Sud placed women in three different scenarios to see if their footwear would influence how men act around them.

And the results, published online in the journal ‘Archives of Sexual Behaviour’, found that women are more likely to be helped, can persuade men more easily to stop in the street and wait less time to be picked up by a man if they are wearing high-heeled shoes.

Women wearing heels were picked up twice as quickly by men than those wearing flats in one scenario

‘Women’s shoe heel size exerts a powerful effect on men’s behavior,’ said Nicolas Gueguen, a behaviour science researcher and the study’s author.

‘Simply put, they make women more beautiful.’

The study found women in heels were almost 50 percent more likely to have a dropped glove picked up a man than if they were wearing flats, while they were almost twice as likely to persuade men to stop to answer survey questions in the street.

A high-heeled woman waited half the time to be picked up by a man in a bar compared to when she wore a heel close to the ground.

Some women’s rights activists have objected to the wearing of high heels, saying they reinforce a misogynist stereotype.

Paris-based sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann said:

‘In a seduction setting, men are very attracted by a woman in heels as she looks taller, more sexually confident, sure of herself, and has a lengthened silhouette and sensual jutting buttocks.’