Peter

If you stood all the men in the world on top of each other in a giant wobbly tower, and all the women next to them in another giant wobbly tower, which would be taller? :-)

While there's huge overlap in the height ranges of men and women, and some individual men are clearly going to be shorter than some individual women, I don't have any problem with the former statement.

Interestingly if you'd made it about, say, maths ability (or indeed anything which might involve a value judgment) I'd find an equivalent statement much more problematic.

Samuel Delany had an essay where he said that studies that were just supposed to be about height yielded quite different results for height differences between men and women, whereas studies that measured people's heights incidentally while studying something else had results suggesting minimal differences between sexes (if any). He also points out that anecdotal experience is misleading since male-female couples are very likely (due to social pressure) to consist of a taller man and a shorter woman, and since taller women and shorter men are likely to be too ashamed of themselves to go out in public much.

Unfortunately it's hard to verify these claims, but it's interesting to think about. I think both statements are bad because the first statement implies that every man is taller than every woman, whereas the second implies that everyone is the same height.