The Petite Woman

Christina Milian, Salma Hayek and Reese Witherspoon

There is nothing as irritating and feeble-minded as the underestimation of the petite woman's physique. Petite women are usually expected to have little strength to match their size and regarded as incapable of doing as much as the average woman. The uncomfortable truth is close to one third of the world's population of women are petite but they don’t realize it.

So, who is a petite woman? In the US, women that are approximately 5 ft 4’ and under are referred to as petite. Sometimes, I find that so many petite women criticize one another. Meek, fragile, delicate, vulnerable... is usually the characteristics associated with women of this physique. For those that come off with a bold and strong character, people often assume her stature to be the reason, stating things like “She is bold... because she is small and don’t want people to take her for granted.”...sigh.  

Grace Kelly

Some series of secret interviews was conducted by Barbara Walters for the ABC 20/20 Show that entailed a company seeking people to fill their executive positions. The results showed that the interviewers before the interviews perceived petite woman to be lacking intelligence, competence and leadership abilities due to her height. However, on the contrary, the petite female executives interviewed possessed top notch education and management experience, which many of the tall women considerably lacked in comparison.

While I have nothing against the tall or average sized women (plus my mum is average and sister is tall), I find that the generalization of petite women into a fixed stereotype is bizarre and ridiculous.