Research explains why women are always cold at work

If you’re a lady, you’re not alone.

People with a lower metabolic rate will tend to be uncomfortable in the current standard. Sounds complicated enough to be foolproof, right? Many are forced by necessity to come to work on a hot summer day with a spare sweater or a freaking Snuggie, while men coworkers seem to be all fine, comfortable wearing only shorts and a T-shirt.

The two researchers from Maastricht University in the Netherlands tested 16 female students in their 20s and aimed to prove that using the current formula, these females could not maintain optimal temperatures within their thermoneutral zone.

And don’t forget, where air-con leads, the office heating follows.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough for companies to turn down the air conditioning to make a balance.

If you are a woman who wears unseasonably bulky clothing or wraps up in a blanket while at your desk in New York City every summer because it’s too chilly indoors, there’s now a scientific study that explains why.

The women’s metabolic rates were significantly lower than the standard values based on the 40-year-old man, the researchers found. One reason is that women are generally smaller than men and have a higher percentage of fat cells than their male counterparts, Kingma said. Change the setting to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, and you’ll likely have the ideal office temperature for women.

The authors note that most buildings today are geared towards men’s metabolic rate to provide thermal comfort.

Indoor climate control systems are partly based on the resting metabolic rate of an average 40-year-old man, say scientists and may overestimate the female rate by up to 35 per cent.

“As the built environment is focusing more on design of energy-efficient buildings (for example, near-zero-energy buildings), we argue that indoor climate standards should accurately represent the thermal demand of all occupants”.

“We found that the standards globally – at least for the metabolic rate – are based on an average male”, researcher Boris Kingma told CNNMoney.

“They authors are probably correct” that women have a lower metabolic rate, says Texas A&M University’s Charles Culp, a specialist in building physics. New research suggests that there may be one in your office! Still, said Carnegie Mellon architecture professor Khee Poh Lam, “we need to keep pushing” for improvements because “the phenomenon of women getting cold is very, very obvious”, and cold or hot employees are less productive.

“I can only speculate” on why the targets have ignored women for the last few decades, he says.