A Nature.com scientific report provides additional confirmation of something most of us that work in offices or who design office buildings already know – women are always cold and men always hot in the office. The authors analyzed over 38,000 responses from a Center for the Built Environment survey performed by the University of California, Berkeley. Survey results found that 38% of respondents were dissatisfied with the temperature in their offices. This is almost double the expected 20% dissatisfaction rate that most comfort standards are supposed to address. Women were 1.8 times more likely to be uncomfortable, compared to men.
This study went further and delved into social media to provide another data point to document this phenomenon. Almost 17,000 tweets about office building comfort were collected and analyzed. An algorithm was used to determine the gender of the tweet generator. 66% of the complaints were from women, in spite of women being about 55% of the office occupants.
Literature cited that overcooling offices in general costs $10 billion a year in higher utility costs. Reasons for this are fairly obvious – significant differences in professional clothing levels for men and women, and women having a lower metabolic rate than men. The article does not suggest a way to overcome this, other than labeling this an issue of office comfort equity. But it does suggest that giving more temperature control to individual occupants and relaxing dress codes (eliminating men’s coat/tie or even allowing business casual dress) could improve productivity since comfortable people generally work better. – Steve Terry, DTC HVAC & Refrigeration Instructor
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