Height of a character

It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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In a novel I read recently, the heroine contemplates her height. She is 168 cm tall, and she considers herself short. She is the shortest of her numerous siblings and upset about it.

This little factoid didn’t affect the story, but it had me thinking. I’m 156 cm. I’m objectively short for an adult, and I like it that way. I like being small. For me 168 cm feels pretty tall or at least, average. Why would she feel short?

Obviously, this is a subjective measurement. The character compares herself to other tall people in her life and feels the lack of inches. She compensates with huge heels. I compare myself to almost everyone (almost every adult is taller than I am) and enjoy being the smallest. I hate shoes with heels.

I wonder why the author included this data in her book. Why did she use the precise count? What did she have to prove? The heroine’s height wasn’t relevant to the story. As a writer myself, I never state my protagonists’ heights to this level of accuracy. I might sometimes say something like “small and slender” or “big-boned”, but I’ve never included the exact number of centimeters or kilograms in my fiction and never will. I think it is unneeded in most cases, unless it is a mystery where those centimeters might be a clue. It was definitely extraneous in the aforementioned book – it was a science fiction flick, not a mystery.

Do you include similar information in your stories? Is it important to you? Always? Never? Why?