Gender, Height, Intelligence, and Status

 Unlike the psychologist below, I do not endorse the idea that men are more intelligent than women on average because it is really hard to define intelligence.  Men are more intelligent than women on some kinds of tasks and clearly less intelligent than women on other kinds of tasks.  Given that men largely created the IQ tests, it should not be too surprising if they selected tasks that felt they were good at to put on the IQ tests.  It is impossible for me to say which kinds of intellectual tasks are the most important parts of intelligence, so I do not claim that one gender is more intelligent than the other.  However, I have never seen a behavioral quality where men have less variance than women.  No doubt some exist, but all the (somewhat limited) studies I have seen have demonstrated that men are more variable.  That is important for explaining differences in extremes between men and women. For example, most mentally retarded people are men and most geniuses are too.   Psychology Today:

The orthodoxy in intelligence research for the second half of the 20th century had been that men and women had the same average intelligence, but men had greater variance in their distribution than women.  Most geniuses were men, and most imbeciles were men, they said, while most women were in the normal range.  This conclusion, however, was manufactured out of political expediency.  Not wanting to discover, or a priori denying, any sex differences in intelligence, psychometricians simply deleted from the standardized IQ tests any item on which the performance of men and women differed.
More recently, however, especially since the turn of the millennium, there have been an increasing number of studies that cast doubt on this politically correct conclusion.  Studies with large representative national samples from Spain, Denmark, and the United States, as well as meta-analyses of a large number of published studies throughout the world, all conclude that men on average are slightly but significantly more intelligent than women, by about 3-5 IQ points.  So this has now become the new (albeit tentative) consensus in intelligence research.
...Psychometricians have known since the end of the 19th century that height is positively correlated with intelligence:  Taller people on average are more intelligent than shorter people.  And men in every human population are taller than women.  So one possibility is that men are more intelligent than women, not because they are men, but because they are taller.
... In fact, once we control for height, women are slightly but significantly more intelligent than men.  Further controlling for health, physical attractiveness, age, race, education, and earnings does not alter this conclusion.  Height has exactly the same effect on intelligence for men and women:  Each inch in height increases the IQ by about .4 point.  The partial effect of height on intelligence is more than three times as strong as the partial effect of sex.
So it is not that men are more intelligent than women, but that taller people are more intelligent than shorter people, but net of height women are more intelligent than men.  Women who are 5’10” are on average more intelligent than men who are 5’10”, and women who are 5’5” are on average more intelligent than men who are 5’5”.  But, more importantly, people who are 5’10” are significantly more intelligent than people who are 5’5”, and most people who are 5’10” are men and most people who are 5’5” are women.

Kanazawa continues:

why are taller people more intelligent than shorter people? ...we don’t know for sure, but there are two possible explanations.  First, both height and intelligence may be indicators of underlying health.  According to this view, people who are genetically and developmentally healthier simultaneously grow taller and become more intelligent than those who are less healthy, producing the positive correlation between height and intelligence.

Kanazawa has evidence that health and intelligence are uncorrelated and he believes that intelligence and height are correlated because both are sexy!  His only evidence is the correlation between the three:  

...Taller people are on average physically more attractive than shorter people; physically more attractive people are on average more intelligent than physically less attractive people; taller people are on average more intelligent than shorter people... But the issue is far from resolved.  While there is no doubt that taller people are indeed more intelligent than shorter people, the question of why this is so is one of the remaining puzzles in evolutionary psychology.

 So, maybe the reason that tall people and beautiful people earn more than the rest of us is that they are smarter on average.  If so, then work hard on your schoolwork because smarts can be developed by exercising your brain.  An alternative hypothesis is that height, and beauty, are correlated with self-confidence and status and that leads to higher achievement on intelligence tests and higher earnings.  Again, confidence and status can be developed by working hard to achieve mastery.  Social support helps increase learning, confidence, and status.  Encourage your friends to work (and think) hard. 
Society awards status to tall, beautiful people and that increases confidence.  One study found that it is one's relative height in adolescence that increases later smarts and earnings rather than one's height at other ages.  It is hard to think of a biological reason why height in adolescence would increase later earnings and smarts, but it is easy to see why it would increase status and confidence during an extremely socially awkward time in most people's lives.  Similarly, several studies have found that it is relative height that gives a lifelong advantage to soccer players (in Europe) and hockey players (in Canada).  The kids who have birthdays near the youth league cutoff dates typically end up as the professional athletes.  That is because the older kids are relatively tall compared with other kids in their leagues growing up and that creates status and confidence and helps them get a lot of practice and love of the game.