It is occasionally observed that immigrants to the U.S., say Japanese or Mexican and their offspring, increase in height with time here. This is attributed to nutrition, health care, and the like.
Now, no doubt this is true to some extent.
However, I suspect that the observation in part includes offspring of Japanese or Mexican and non-Japanese or Mexican, which will, obviously, increase height for genetic reasons.
Question 1.: Do offspring of immigrants with parents and grandparents of THEIR group increase significantly in height when in the U.S? Do they eventually approach the height of non-immigrant American?
Question 2: It certainly seems that American women have gotten considerably taller (for whatever reason) over the past four or five decades, But recent figures from Centers for Disease Control give the average American woman’s height as just under five feet, four inches, what it was, I believe, five decades ago.
Data are for the U.S.
Measured average height, for woman aged 20 and over.
Women:
Height in inches: 63.7 (Five feet, three point seven inches).
It seems unlikely, at least with observation of white women, that they are not taller than they were fifty years ago.
The best explanation I can think of is that white women have gotten taller, but this has been balanced by immigration of shorter Asian and Hispanic women. Is this true? Or is it true that observation is incorrect and white women have not gotten any taller over the decades?
I am 6ft, I am an American woman ( mixed ancestry, nothing crazy ). Every other woman I know is shorter than me. I admit I not in exactly a large group. I live in an isolated area. So most of my comparison are family and a few friends. And then there is woman’s clothing. I have rarely found jeans or pants long enough. Blouses and long sleeve shirts are always too short for my amazingly long arms. The designing and manufacturing of clothing seems to agree with your premise that woman are that short. That is my experience, FWIW.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the increase in the Hispanic and Asian populations, as a proportion, in the US over the past few decades has influenced the average, but I don’t know that I can find that info easily.
BTW, since you clearly hunted down a cite for your data in your OP, it’s really helpful if you share a link to that info, so others can see where you got it, and dig into more details.
I did find this link to a CNN article, which indicates that the average height of an American adult woman has only risen by one inch (5’3" to 5’4") over the past 100 years. That also suggest to me the possibility that improvements in health and nutrition played a role in the first half of the last century, but haven’t done much to increase height in the past 50 years.
A little more digging found this article, which indicates that that’s exactly what’s happened – for the past few decades, most American children have had sufficient nutrition.