When it comes to establishing what percentage of women wear high heels, statistics are easily to find.
Establishing the truth of them is much more difficult.
There have been many surveys about women’s high heel shoe habits, but they all suffer from unreliability in one way or other.
Our best estimate is that, on average, only about 20% of women wear high heels. Of these, probably only 10% wear heels daily (by which we mean they wear them to work each day).
These figures differ from some other numbers that have been published about high heel use. But this is not surprising since the available data provides a huge range of answers to the question about how many women wear heels and how often.
We’ve analysed this in some detail below. But, in the meantime, why should you trust our estimate that only around 20% of women wear high heels on average?
And why do we say that probably only around 10% of women wear high heels daily?
We’ve analysed all the available data and set it out in this article. Of this, the most accurate seems to be the 2014 study for the American Podiatric Medical Association, not least because the sample size was controlled to be census representative.
This survey found that 26% of women wore heels weekly or less than once per week (73% wore them never or rarely, and 1% were not sure). It seems fair to classify the 26% as being heel wearers even if they only wear them a couple of times a month.
However, high heel use is dropping and the survey is a decade old. For that reason we’ve discounted the percentage that wear heels to an approximation of 20%.
The figure of 10%, or half those who wear heels, as a daily wear is less scientific. The survey found that 19% wore heels weekly, so the daily number cannot be higher than this.
We’ve discounted it on the basis that fewer women would likely wear heels daily than weekly, the changing trends since the survey and our own observations of how many women wear heels and how regularly. That gets the rough figure of 10%.
You may have heard different numbers, for example that 37% of women wear heels daily, based on a 1993 survey.
But, as we explain further below, that was a non-representative sample size, consisting of women who were mainly patients at an orthopaedic conference. It also didn’t ask what women what shoes they wore daily, just what they wore to work and for leisure.
Or you might have heard that up to 78% of British women wear high heels daily. But this is a misstatement of an unsourced statistic, as we examine further too.
In the end, don’t let the precision of any of these numbers fool you into believing they are accurate.
Estimates of heel-wearing vary wildly, and most of the statistics are misquoted or wildly inaccurate. We discuss this further below.
1993 high heel survey
An early survey of women’s shoe habits was conducted in 1993. This was published as American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society Women’s Shoe Survey in the February 1993 edition of Foot & Ankle (C Frey, F Thompson, J Smith, M Sanders and H Horstman).
It is from this survey that you might hear the figure of 37% heel-wearing quoted. But not so fast, because that’s not what the survey actually found.
The survey evaluated a total of 356 women, aged between 20 and 60. It confined itself to women with no history of diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, previous foot trauma or foot surgery.
However, of these women, some 73% were “patients in an orthopaedic office who were seen for all types of orthopaedic complaints, including foot problems”.
That’s right: 73% of the women surveyed (that is, 260 of them) were orthopaedic patients including those with foot problems. Just a minority of 27% were not orthopaedic patients.
The data also showed that the average age of these women was 42 years old. The majority of the occupations were professionals (23%), nurses / healthcare (19%), clerical / sales (19%) and homemakers (also 19%). Teachers (5%), students (5%) and entertainers / artists / sports professionals (4%) made up the rest of the disclosed occupations.
No other identifiers potentially relevant to wearing heels were published and no suggestion was made that the sample size was in any way representative of the female population.
So the survey suffered from some obvious problems if you wanted to extrapolate the data to the female population. A survey which interviewed women with an average age of 42 who were mainly sitting in an orthopaedic office was not likely to skew particularly towards wearing heels.
And so it showed. But, even then, the survey did not actually make a finding about the percentage of women that wear heels. Rather it asked about work and leisure separately.
It noted two relevant findings. First, that overall 14% of the women wore sneakers to work, 37% wore heels, and 49% wore flats.
Secondly, that for leisure overall 39% wore sneakers, 10% wore heels, and 51% wore flats. The leisure activities were not identified which was not particularly helpful. Since only 6% said they wore sneakers all the time, the 39% for sneakers seems strange. Surely some women would wear all different types of shoes depending on the leisure activity itself.
What then does this survey tell us? Well, not much. All it really says is that of this group of women, 37% of them wore heels to work and 10% wore them for leisure (whatever that meant).
For those who wore them to work, we don’t have any indication in the study of how occupations which wouldn’t ordinarily require heels to be worn were treated (eg sports professionals, homemakers and – hopefully – nurses). Were they excluded or were they counted as “no heels” which would drive down the overall number?
In other words, it may be that the professional women wore heels at work to a much greater percentage than 37% but the survey itself doesn’t tell us. Much less does it allow us to extrapolate these numbers to the rest of the population.
So, valuable though this survey may have been for other reasons, it does not give any really useful data on high heel wearing rates for the average woman.
2007 online high heel survey
A 2007 online survey by a blister-remedy manufacturer seems to be the only source for the extraordinary claim made in 2010 that up to 78% of British women wear high heels on a daily basis.
In 2017 the claim was abstracted to state that an “estimated 78% of women regularly walk in high heels”. It’s the statistic that just refuses to die. But should it have lived in the first place?
Once again, there’s no solid evidence for this claim about heel use. It is quite obviously too high and dead wrong as we explain.
In February 2007, foot treatment company Compeed conducted an online survey of 1,095 British women. As far as we can see, the full results were never published. They are not available on the internet including in archive.
PR specialists The Ogilvie Group seem to have spruiked the results, causing The Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists to write an article about it on their now-defunct “Feet for Life” website (archived here).
But what did the article actually say?
The only mention of the figure 78% is in a paragraph which states that “over 78% of British women admit to wearing them” (meaning high heels).
What does this mean? It certainly doesn’t mean that 78% of British women wear heels every day. What it seems to mean is that 78% of British women have worn heels at least at some stage of their lives.
The concepts of “regularly” walking in heels or doing so “on a daily basis” are just not mentioned.
There is yet another problem with this statistic: its origin. The article doesn’t actually link the 78% statistic to the results of the survey.
The full sentence in the article reads like this: “Despite the agonies caused by heels, over 78% of British women admit to wearing them, implying they are not willing to trade style for comfort.”
There’s no mention of the survey in the sentence. Meanwhile the article itself states “All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc.”
So the statistic could well have come from YouGov Plc (where it is also no longer available).
In short, this statistic on heel-use is completely unreliable even before we get to questions about the independence of those creating the study. It should be ignored.
2014 high heel survey
In 2014, Edge Research conducted a national opinion survey on behalf of the American Podiatric Medical Association (APMA) on attitudes toward foot health and foot care.
The respondents were all US adults, age 18 or older, recruited from a national panel. The group was controlled to be census representative by gender, age, region, and ethnicity.
One question asked the 522 female respondents “what type of shoes do you own?”.
Only 256 respondents included high heels in their answer, meaning only 49% of female respondents admitted to even owning a pair of heels let alone wearing them.
APMA were themselves the first to spin the statistic, putting out a press release saying that “nearly half of all women (49 percent) wear high heels”.
Do you spot the problem? Yes, the survey question didn’t ask what women wore but rather what they owned. A woman who owned a pair of heels but never wore them would have been included in the 49%.
However a second question then asked the 256 respondents who said they did own heels how often they actually wore them. Those results were split as follows: Rarely 45%, Weekly 39%, Less than once per week 15% and Not sure 1%.
We need to extrapolate this data out to all respondents in order to get a true high heel wearing rate. This is because the percentages above are calculated from the data set of women who actually owned heels (therefore ignoring the 51% who said they did not).
The results of whether women wear high heels according to this survey are therefore as follows:
Never 51%
Rarely 22%
Less than once per week 7%
Weekly 19%
Not sure 1%
Adding together the weekly and less than once a week wearers produces a figure of 26% for heel-wearing women.
Image credit: cottonbro studio