The New Cold War, Air Conditioning - Battle of the sexes
Author: John Clifford Date Posted:16 September 2015
The solution to the office temperature debate.
Despite winter feeling extremely long this year, summer is on the horizon. When it arrives, it always brings with it an increase in the use of office air conditioning, which inevitably leads to disagreements about how cold is cold enough.
Research published recently in Nature Climate Change drew significant media attention, when it found that women commonly feel colder in an office environment than men. The research conducted at Maastricht University in the Netherlands showed that while men are comfortable with a temperature setting of about 22°C, women find that’s about 3 degrees too chilly.
Why we ‘feel” temperature differently.
It’s no simple task to please everyone in the office and there are a number of reasons why women feel temperature differently. Firstly, women have a lower metabolic rate than men so are more prone to feeling the cold. The fact that women also have a naturally higher fat content in their bodies compared with men who have a higher muscle content also contributes, as muscle produces more heat than fat.
