That's not a particularly useful sense. There's more variation in height amongst men and women than between them too, but we're still perfectly happy to say that men are taller than women.

bad analogy. the height variance (not absolute bounds) in each sex is probably smaller than the difference in mean height. whereas this is not true of other metrics like intelligence

And why should that mark the Authoritative Threshold on whether a statistical skew counts as a "social construct"?

And if we crunched the numbers and falsified your assertion? Would you really turn on a dime and accept that okay, it's a social construct that men are taller?

I don't understand your argument. if you look at two bell curves for IQ and they look almost identical except for a slightly different mean, you're really going to go "okay that group is obviously smarter"? height is a different story - the curves are going to look much different. if you really don't want to get that then there's no point in continuing

That's true. There is more intra-group variation because within any group you have geniuses and you have morons, which is the widest spread you can have either intra-group or inter-group.

If every group is a bell curve, then the curves have similar variance and similar mean as well, and the variance within each group is larger than the difference between the means, and the differences are not big enough to say in a meaningful way that one group is smarter than another.