prompter: Are men taller than women on average?

assistant: Yes, men are taller than women on average. The worldwide average height for men is 175 cm (69 inches, or 5 feet 9 inches), while the worldwide average height for women is 162 cm (64 inches, or 5 feet 4 inches).

assistant: Yes they are. But keep in mind it's on average.
Also there are differences between different cultures and nations. Some of this is due to food more than genes though. Mainland chinese people are significantly shorter than Hong Kong chinese. Even though their DNA is quite alike.

assistant: Yes, men are on average 12cm taller than women.
For a more detailed breakdown by region visit: https://www.worlddata.info/average-bodyheight.php

prompter: Interesting. So why exactly are men taller, in general? Just a survival of the fittest kind of thing?

assistant: Before I answer your question it should be noted that 'survival of the fittest' does not actually mean that the strongest animal wins. After all, if that was the case you would expect women to get stronger too. Rather 'survival of the fittest' means the animals survive that are most fit to the environment, or the ones which are best adapted to the conditions in which they find themselves. Big muscles might be worth less than a large store of fat in a region with bitter winters.

As far as men being taller than women goes, it is a general trend in mammals for males to be larger than their female counterparts. The generally accepted explanation for this is that males have different mating incentives than females, a theory known as sexual selection. In essence females have a bottleneck on the number of offspring they can produce, namely the time to develop a fetus to birth. Males on the other hand can inseminate many females in parallel in a short period of time. This means that male sexual competition has stronger winner-take-all dynamics where the strongest males can reproduce with many females at once, leaving fewer for their weaker counterparts. Gorillas might be the primate that most exemplifies this dynamic. It is typical for the strongest, most dominant gorilla to take an entire pack worth of females as his harem and mate with them, leaving none for his less powerful rivals.

While it would be crass to comment on this dynamic too much in humans, it should be noted that testes size tends to correlate with the amount of sexual competition a male primate 'expects' to experience. With bonobos having among the largest, most obscene testes and the aforementioned gorillas having very small ones because a dominant gorilla has so little competition. Human testes are about middle of the road for primates, implying that human males expect a certain amount of sexual competition or infidelity in their partners, but have a bias towards monogamy.

assistant: Yes, according to the theory of evolution which has proven very accurate, is exceedingly likely that men are taller due to natural selection, or "survival of the fittest" as you would say. There are multiple more specific theories as to what could be selecting for taller males such as: Mate Competition, Resource Competition, Inter-group Violence, and Female Selection.

prompter: Some women are taller than men. Why?

assistant: While it is true that some individual women may be taller than some individual men, on average, men tend to be taller than women globally. The average height of adult men is about 5'7" to 5'9" (173-175 cm), while the average height of adult women is about 5'3" to 5'5" (160-165 cm).

However, height is determined by various factors such as genetics, environment, nutrition, and health, so there will always be some individuals who deviate from the average height for their gender. There are many factors that can influence height, including genetics, nutrition, health, and environmental factors, and there is significant variation in height within both male and female populations. So, it is not uncommon for some women to be taller than some men.

assistant: That's because men are only higher on average, not on every single basis. There is a big overlap in height statistics where only in the top and bottom centiles one gender is excluded. That means it's likely for a woman to be higher than a man of similar age.

assistant: It dependant on Genetics, they most likely had taller parents than the men in question.

assistant: It’s hormonal. Essentially estrogen causes growth plates to fused faster than males.

Got a brief period woman are taller than males.

Estrogen causes faster growth at first , then fuses the growth plates.