Table 1. Occurrences of similar height partners (♂ = ♀), male taller (♂>♀) and male shorter (♂<♀) compared to female, and Parental Height Differences (PHD; male height – female height) in bins of 5 centimetre in couples from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) and in the 10,000 samples of random mating.

	Number of observed cases
	MCS	10,000 Random samples
		median	95% data range	Differencea	Rel. likel. pairingb
♂<♀	511	811	772–851	<.0001	0.63
♂ = ♀	425	460	420–499	.0442	0.92
♂>♀	11566	11231	11185–11277	<.0001	1.03
PHD (in cm)
< −10	78	167	147–189	<.0001	0.47
−10 to −5	192	330	299–362	<.0001	0.58
−5 to −0	241	314	282–348	<.0001	0.78
0 to 5	1058	1090	1034–1146	.1372	0.97
5 to 10	2032	1807	1736–1880	<.0001	1.12
10 to 15	2663	2395	2314–2478	<.0001	1.11
15 to 20	2586	2464	2382–2549	.0021	1.05
20 to 25	1917	1969	1896–2044	.0820	0.97
25 to 30	1101	1175	1118–1232	.0056	0.94
30 to 35	461	527	488–567	.0002	0.88
>35	173	262	238–287	.0001	0.66

^a p-value for difference of occurrence of bin between original sample and 10,000 samples of random mating sample (see text).

^bThe Relative likelihood of pairing is the number of occurrences of a bin (second column) divided by the median occurrences of this bin (third column) in the random samples.