I recently had the honor of putting together a Ruger 10/22 for my partner Estephanie, who is 5’3”. Since I think of her as ‘short’, I figured I’d knock an inch off the stock. Most “youth” stocks are about an inch shorter than standard, so I guessed this would be plenty.
When she excitedly picked it up and shouldered it for the first time, it was still obviously too long for her. She was wrapping around the stock and stretching to reach the trigger, and her cheek weld was very far back and at an awkward angle. By the time we got it sized for her to have a comfortable cheek weld that lined up with the sights, I had taken more than 3” off of the stock. I was absolutely shocked; I had no idea how much of a difference in stock length was necessary to fit someone her height. It made me re-assess the body geometry of a number of smaller-framed people who I shoot with, and I quickly started to see that almost everyone who is not between 5’11” and 6’1” was drastically altering their body geometry to use a gun that was not at all the right size for them.

Most of these people have never thought about it. When they started shooting, they were told it would feel awkward at first, so they just think that the improper fit is part of the shooting experience. This is equivalent to all people being given the same size bicycle (built for a 6’ person) and told that riding is just awkward at first, and everyone using the same size bike for the rest of their lives, even though it never fits them properly and they can never achieve the comfort, familiarity, or skill with it that they could if their tool fit them. Just imagine that; imagine everyone you know just riding around on the exact same size bike, which only fits like 15% of the people.

This compounds the bizarre and wildly harmful trend of shooting being a boy’s club. Almost no guns are sized for average-height women, let alone short women. In fact, guns off-the-shelf are sized for taller-than-average men. Being a 6’ person, I had never thought about this until I was consciously building a gun for someone who I really care about, and making sure it fit them properly.

Not only are guns not sized for average people, they are often very difficult to alter to fit. Wooden stocks are by far the easiest rifle stocks to adjust (other than tactically adjustable stocks,) but even wooden stocks are obviously not made for it. The buttstock on my partner’s rifle is a foam pad glued to a plastic frame, which screws into the wood. The plastic frame is segmented. By the time I had cut her stock down to fit, the frame did not make contact with the wood, so I had to fabricate a solid steel plate, cut the foam off the original frame, glue it to my new plate, cut and dress the foam to fit, and drill new holes for the screws to hold it to the wood. Without a friendly carpenter/metalworker to help, this would cost a pretty penny at a gunsmith. A hollow plastic stock would be even worse.
All of this is infuriating. It all just reinforces the narrative that shooting is only for big manly-men, and it does so in a way that is so subtle that many thoughtful people in the shooting community never really notice how serious it is. If you also feel anger at this extremely subtle and harmful nonsense, I hope that you can channel it into being motivated to seek out and work with firearms that fit your body, and support those around you to experience guns that fit them. This takes work, but the result is making a skill set accessible to groups of people who have been structurally excluded from these skills for too long. I share a very rough chart of height-to-LOP here. It’s probably not going to be direct fit, but it will get you much closer to the right ballpark than off-the-shelf “women’s” and “youth” models. (Probably wise to leave them long at first and try them. It’s easy to take more off, and individual body shapes beyond just height will affect these numbers.)

If you've been sized and honed in on exactly what LoP you prefer, I'd love to hear your height and preferred LoP. Also, does it differ for rifles vs. shotguns for you?
May we all learn to see and destroy the structural barriers to the skills necessary for our empowerment and liberation.