Get Easy Health Digest™ in your inbox and don’t miss a thing when you subscribe today. Plus, get the free bonus report, Mother Nature’s Tips, Tricks and Remedies for Cholesterol, Blood Pressure & Blood Sugar as my way of saying welcome to the community!
Turning up the office thermostat turns up performance for women
When you were in high school or college, did you ever sit through a test where you just couldn’t concentrate? Where all you could think about was how cold the room was, and how you wished you’d brought a sweater? Or maybe a coat?
And, now that I think about it, in my experience it’s been the women at work (myself included!) who are always begging to have the air conditioning setting turned up, so they don’t freeze to death.
As it turns out, there’s science at work here. Women just work better and think better at different temperatures than men do.
Unfortunately, most workplaces are, well, full of men who control the thermostat and they like those low numbers.
Not only does this make the women put on extra layers. It turns out that it could actually be costing the company they work for in terms of productivity and their bottom line
A recent study demonstrates this. Maybe it will be enough to give women back some control of the thermostat!
«SPONSORED»
How do workplaces set the temperature?
A “thermal comfort model” arrived at in the 1960s and is used in most public buildings and workplaces to determine how the room temperature is set.
This model is largely based on “metabolic equivalents,” or how much energy a body requires while sitting, walking or running. These equivalents were calculated in the 1930s but did not take into account some things we know now that change the numbers.
Related: Is a man’s office bad for your health?
For one, women have a higher fat-to-muscle ratio than men. And fat cells produce less heat than muscle cells do. Thus, women tend to feel colder than men do in the same air temperature.
Therefore, if the room temperature is even a little too cold, a woman’s body starts to preserve heat by keeping blood closer to the body’s core, leaving hands, feet and nose cold and pale. This is when women grab that sweater and make a cup of tea.
Boris Kingma, a biophysicist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, authored a study where he set out to prove that the 80-year-old metabolic equivalents being used are just bad data.
As Kingma put it, “Garbage in, garbage out… if you put in the wrong metabolic rate, you get an answer which is of course not valid.”
To prove his point and determine a more accurate female metabolic equivalent, Kingma had sixteen women in T-shirts and sweatpants spend time in a temperature-controlled room and calculated the rate at which they were consuming oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide — in other words, their metabolic rate.
He found that those rates were significantly lower than the standard resting metabolic rate commonly used to regulate room temperatures. So, their bodies actually needed a higher room temperature to be comfortable.
You can’t think well when you’re freezing!
Not only are women freezing at work when the A/C is cranking. They’re at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to performance.
Researchers recruited 543 students from universities in Berlin and asked them to complete three different tests: adding two-digit numbers without a calculator (50 problems in five minutes), building smaller words from the letters in a long word, and solving problems involving intuitive thinking.
An increase in temperature of just 1.8°F. was associated with a 1.76 percent increase in the number of math problems solved correctly.
This would equal nearly half of the four percent performance gap that traditionally exists between male and female students on the math section of the SAT.
According to Bjarne Oleson, head of the International Center for Indoor Environment and Energy, Americans are keeping their buildings in a deep freeze that isn’t good for people or business.
In summer, international standards recommend temperatures between 73°F. and 79°F., while most buildings are set between 68 and 73, which is what is recommended for winter.
So, turning down that A/C a bit doesn’t just make women more comfortable. It can improve a company’s bottom line… which helps everyone!
Sources:
- Chilly Rooms May Cool Women’s Productivity — Smithsonian
- Cold Offices Could Actually Be Harming Women’s Cognitive Performance, Study Suggests — ScienceAlert
- Women, There’s A Reason Why You’re Shivering In The Office — NPR
- Frigid Offices Might Be Killing Women’s Productivity — The Atlantic
- The influence of local effects on thermal sensation under non-uniform environmental conditions–gender differences in thermophysiology, thermal comfort and productivity during convective and radiant cooling — Physiology & Behavior
- Resting metabolic rate is lower in women than in men — Journal of Applied Physiology
By Joyce Hollman
«SPONSORED»
