Age Difference Between Leading Actors and Actresses

Much has been made of the age gap between leading men and women.  Male romantic leads are often cast opposite much younger females.  And it is often difficult for actresses to find roles after age 40. While I suspect this gender gap has improved in the past 50 years, I decided to see if it is still alive and well.  I built a spider to scrape age data for the top 5,000 actors and actresses, as ranked by IMDb "starmeter."

For the 500 most popular actors and actresses on IMDb, the average actor is age 40.77 and the average actress is age 33.39.  Expanding to the top 5,000 actors and actresses on IMDb, the gap narrows.  Here the average actor is 44.74 and the average actress is 39.47.

Not surprisingly, star popularity is correlated to age.  The top 50 actors are the youngest, and possess the largest age gap between men and women.  For the top 5000 actors, the average age is older, and with a smaller age gap.  This chart shows how the age gap narrows as popularity decreases.

Another interesting phenomenon is that 60% of the top 500 most popular stars on IMDb are female.  This trend holds true for the top 100 most popular stars, as well as for the top  50.  Put another way, only 40% of the 500 most popular stars on IMDb are male.

However, when the sample size is stretched to include the 5,000 most popular stars, women equal men almost exactly (50.59% - 49.41%).

So why are women more likely to have high starmeter ratings?  Amazon's starmeter algorithm is a measure of what people are searching for.  A glance at the IMDb message boards suggests IMDb's userbase is disproportionately male.  So it could very well be that men search for their favorite actresses at a higher rate than women search for their favorite actors.  Thus, actresses may have a slight advantage in obtaining top "starmeter" rankings on IMDb.

Actor Height Myths

There is a long-standing belief in popular culture that actors are shorter than the national average.  I decided to put the theory to the test, creating a spider to scrape height data for the top 5,000 ranked actors and actresses on IMDb. It turns out: actors and actresses - by IMDb height - are two inches taller than the national average.

Heights of the Top 500 Actors and Actresses as Ranked by IMDb's "Starmeter."

The top 500 actors average 5 foot 11.7 inches versus the national male average of 5 foot 9.5 inches. The top 500 actresses average 5 foot 5.72 inches versus the national female average of 5 foot 4 inches.  The trend holds for the top 1,000 actors and actresses, as well as the top 5,000.

The easiest explanation is that both actors and actresses are finding ways to over-report their heights on IMDb on a massive scale. However, when I spot-checked a list of famously short actors and actresses, I found no discrepancies between IMDb's numbers, and celebrityheights.com. Granted, I'm not sure how to rigorously fact check 5,000 IMDb actor heights.

If actors are over-reporting their heights, it is worth noting they are no different from the rest of us.  OKCupid found their users report heights two inches above the national average.

The alternative explanation is that successful actors are simply taller.  This success/height correlation should make some sense given the data that taller people are smarter, earn more money, and are more respected by their peers, than short people (I am not a particularly tall person, so I write this without any bias).

The real upshot is, there is no data to support the idea that actors and actresses are shorter than average. In fact, the more popular an actor is, the more likely he is to be tall (actresses, on the other hand, retain a constant height regardless of popularity).

Methodology: Because certain minority groups may be underrepresented in the top 5,000 actors, the charts above compare actors to the average height for American Caucasians.

For my data set, I parsed out actors and actresses under 18, as they may not yet have achieved full height.