The Great Corporate Female Freeze-Out
As temperatures rise outside, companies turn up the AC, to the detriment of women’s productivity and comfort. There’s a solution.
Only a slight dramatization.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of an office job must be in want of a sweater in the summer. That’s when the air conditioning is often cranked up in offices, freezing many women out. As one comedy site, which dubbed the season “women’s winter,” explained, “when spring turns to summer and there’s blossom on the trees, the office air doth turn to ice and all the women freeze.”
As it turns out, corporate climactic conditions are designed to ensure the comfort of a person who is male, 40 years old and 154 pounds. It assumes that a person’s metabolic rate generates 60 to 70 watts of resting heat per square meter. But that overestimates the heat women generate by as much as 35 percent. The optimal temperature for the average woman, research suggests, is several degrees higher.