There’s a legitimate reason why.
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Researchers have analyzed the indoor climate regulations in work offices, finding that they are based on an old standard developed in 1960: the metabolic rate of 40 year-old men, weighing on average 70 kilos.
The study urges businesses to “reduce gender-discriminating bias in thermal comfort”, by recalculating the formula to include women’s metabolic averages in the model.
Kingma responds that those same experiments show that women are more sensitive to slight temperature deviations because of their different metabolic rate or body composition or both. The other group (we’ll call them “the women”) complain that the settings make it too cold for comfort. They dressed in typical summer clothes (cotton T-shirt, cotton / polyester sweatpants socks and underwear) and were asked to carry out light office tasks like reading at the table and writing e-mails.
A new study finds that office air conditioning settings were devised for men in the 1960s.
The study wasn’t conducted to resolve an office debate between men and women over temperature, but with a loftier goal of saving the planet.
“The effects on energy consumption of increasing the design indoor temperature will become greater over time as climate change leads to increased outdoor temperatures”, he wrote. But when their actual metabolic rates were used – rather than the standard one that’s based on men – their preferences fell neatly into the zone predicted by the formula. But women now constitute half the workforce and usually have slower metabolic rates than men, mostly because they are smaller and have more body fat, which has a lower metabolic rate than muscle. So, women, if there is a chilly environment in the office, do not just blame the men, educate the management about the situation. “The results of our study also suggest raising the temperature to a more comfortable thermal zone saves employers about $2 per worker, per hour”, said Cornell professor Alan Hedge. Given these improvisations, he added, “whether this actually affects energy, I think that’s a big leap”.
Still, not everyone is going to agree that 24°C is an optimal temperature, notes George Havenith, an environmental physiologist at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom who was not involved with the study.
Kimberly Mark, 31, would appreciate that.
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“Even though I get teased about my block heater, there is always a point in time when everyone wants to borrow it”.
