Frigid offices, freezing women, oblivious men: An air-conditioning investigation

Talking about temperature and gender difference: I get the impression that women have much more freedom when it comes socially accepted clothing for warm/hot weather.

Men can wear t-shirts, but I haven't seen anything sleeveless or shoulder-free that men could wear even in a casual office setting without raising eyebrows.

In many environments, wearing short pants is frowned upon - at least for men. Women don't have to cover their whole legs to be appropriately clad.

So, considering that men simply cannot dress for warm temperatures in an office setting, is it really surprising that they set a lower temperature if they control AC settings?

"Researchers had their hands on the controls at an insurance office for a month. And when they warmed the place from 68 to 77 degrees, typos went down by 44 percent and productivity went up by 150 percent."

I'm sorry, but 77F (25C) is an inferno and there's no way I'd want to work for an extended length of time in an office that warm.

Fundamentally, if you're too cold in an office, you can wear more clothes. Generally I've found my coworkers to be unreceptive to my offers to expose my flabby software developer tummy and legs when I am too warm. I would love to hear any truly equitable and workable solutions to this problem though.

So, my understanding is that humans (gender-non-specific context used) operate best at about 21 degrees (and I'm going to adopt my US cousins' approach and blithely assume that everyone uses the same metric for temperature measurement that I do).

Pretty much every office I've worked in - spanning UK, New Zealand, and Australia - has been around that figure. While it's possible I can be oblivious, it's otherwise surprising that no one (of either gender) has ever raised this as an issue in those places. Perhaps it's more a US thing than a 'men thing'.

A/C at my place of work is like some kind of Stanford-esque psychological experiment.

Not sure about the gender split, but the A/C is definitely an endless source of disagreement. Maybe it's worse when there are multiple controls units because that means the temp setting is up for debate, which ultimately means compromise.

And then there are the days during winter when the heating is on and the A/C is used to control the temp - because the radiators all have thermostatic valves that tend to be adjusted by the people who sit next to them... i.e. a different group of people that sit nearest the A/C control units.

The madness never ends - the office temp goes up and down, energy is wasted, people have 'heated' discussions about whether the A/C should be on.

Not only that, but if one person sets their A/C control to heat mode, the cooling for the entire building goes off.

If I could design a building temp control system that maximises psychological stress then I think the system we have is more or less what I would come up with.

Interestingly enough, I don't think the main issue here is about men vs. women, but rather about thin vs. thick. It just so happens that men tend to be thicker on average, so they are more comfortable in lower ambient temperatures.

The thermostat at my office is controlled by the head honcho, who is a big man with quite a few extra pounds. Him and a similarly big-bellied coworker are the only ones comfortable at the lowest setting. Everyone else freezes their asses off. We are in Austin, TX, where it gets 100 F during summer, and I want to be able to wear short-sleeved polos but I can't, even though our dress code is business casual.

The article is correct in the sense that women on average have it more difficult because of body composition (more water weight = harder to retain body heat), but men with low body fat also tend to have issues.

Walking too and from work in DC, the tables are turned. As a man, I'm sweating through a shirt under a couple layers of wool while women have been able to adjust their wardrobes to the weather and look decidedly less miserable. We will need a culture change in to relax dress codes for men in the summer months in DC, but it seems like a natural trend given that environmental concerns, workplace satisfaction, etc., should all be nudging us to slightly warmer office temperatures and relaxed dress codes for men.

I wonder how much energy we will save if we keep thermostats at 74+... I would be down for that. In general, I find the temperature in most places way too cold.

If sitting in a 72 degree room makes you uncomfortably cold then you probably have a suppressed metabolic rate. Wardrobe doesn't enter into it. These women are probably mildly hypothyroid.