What is the standard deviation of adult human heights for males and females?
It's probably around 7 cm for men and 6 cm for women.

The Evolution of Adult Height in Europe, which is a source for some of the statistics reported on that Wikipedia page, gives averages, standard deviations, and sample sizes for both sexes across 10 european countries (and across a number of different age cohorts).

Taking their numbers for men and women born between 1966 and 1978, the average male standard deviation of height across all ten countries is 7 cm (range 6.7-7.3) and female 6.1 (range 5.6-6.4).

For a more global context, Subramanian et al. give heights with standard deviations for a much wider selection of countries, mostly "developing countries". Unfortunately for your question, they only report numbers for women. However, these  look pretty similar to the Europe numbers: the across-country average SD for women is 6.3. (with all these countries, the range is greater at 5.4-8.1, but 32 out of the 54 countries have SDs within the Europe range for women, i.e. 5.6-6.4)

Note: for this estimate I just ran averages across years/countries, I didn't weight the averages by sample size.




 Subramanian SVS, Özaltin EE, Finlay JEJ. 2010. Height of nations: a socioeconomic analysis of cohort differences and patterns among women in 54 low- to middle-income countries. PLoS ONE 6: e18962–e18962.