In practical, you calculate the standard deviation through calculating the variance. I believe that variance is used more often (apart from interpretation, as you indicated yourself) because it has a lot of statistically interesting properties.
it has unbiased estimators in a lot of cases, leads to known distributions for hypothesis testing etc.
As to variance bigger: (if the variance were the SD would be as soon as your variance or SD are smaller than this order reverses.
Get Answers For Free
Most questions answered within 1 hours.