“It’s a very strange thing, to cool these offices that much.” Offices today often fall between 68 and 72 degrees, he says. “Somehow that is getting more and more extreme, especially in summertime,” van Marken Lichtenbelt says. This means that people of all sexes are at risk from the office chill today. But a survey of office buildings in 2009 revealed that indoor air temperatures often fall below this range, and are in fact colder than the temperature settings for winter. The ASHRAE standards recommend that indoor temperatures stay between 73 and 79 degrees in summer. However, one thing that van Marken Lichtenbelt and Olesen can agree on is that office buildings are kept too cold. ![]() Metabolic rates vary more between individuals than between sexes, he said. In fact, the indoor climate standards created by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) did take women into account, Bjarne Olesen, one of the engineers who worked on the recommendations, told Wired. “Your physiology, your height, your weight, your body mass, how much you are clothed, the type of activity you do all affect your thermal comfort,” Schiavon says. There’s a lot of variation in how different people respond to the cold. And, of course, these are pretty broad generalizations. It’s worth keeping in mind that the study looked at a pretty small number of people, all women. They also noted that women may prefer an average room temperature of 77 degrees Fahrenheit, while men are most comfortable at around 72 degrees. “Current indoor climate standards may intrinsically misrepresent thermal demand of the female and senior subpopulations,” the team wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change. He was one of the researchers who reported in 2015 that women doing office work have lower metabolic rates than those typically included in the models that predict what conditions are needed to keep people comfortable indoors. Women’s generally lower metabolism also contributes to the problem, says Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt, a physiologist at Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands. So even if the core is kept nice and toasty, it might not feel that way. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, Massachusetts. “Fat is a great insulator and because of that, the skin temperature can actually get a little bit lower in women than men,” says John Castellani, a research physiologist at the U.S. That’s partly because on average, women carry around a little more body fat. However, women tend to feel chilled more quickly than men and seem to be particularly vulnerable to wintry working conditions in balmy weather. Not every workplace has the same temperature requirements. There are other ways to make our offices more pleasant for everyone to work in, though, and finding the right balance could even have health benefits. So where does that leave the rest of us? Is there anything we, the permanently chilly, can do to train our bodies to be more cold tolerant? And what will it actually take to make an office environment that keeps more of us comfortable?Īctually changing our body’s response to cold isn’t easy, although people have occasionally managed it. The truth is a little more complicated-but it is very common for office buildings to be kept frosty enough to leave many workers uncomfortable, says Stefano Schiavon, an associate professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. ![]() ![]() One problem, scientists have argued, is that office thermostat settings are still influenced by what researchers figured an “average male” would find comfortable in the 1960s and ’70s, and that this is far from ideal for many workers. There are actually a bunch of reasons why office buildings seem to have been modeled after the frozen caves of Hoth. This is especially true come summer, when the air conditioning roars into life at the same time that many women switch their work wardrobe to lightweight blouses, dresses, and sandals.
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