14 June 2024 , 14:15
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When it comes to working in an office, employees can be split into two camps - those who want the aircon on, and those who wish to keep it switched off -if you're in the second camp then you're likely a woman.
The 'aircon' debate has prompted women to voice their outrage on social media, as they call for an adjustment in its 'out-of-date' temperature settings. In 2015, two scientists from The Netherlands wrote a paper showing that current standards for office temperature were set in the 1960s.
They discovered the temperature is based on the comfort of men wearing business suits. However, as not everybody wears a suit to work these days - and not everyone working in the office is male, people have been urging their bosses to make a change to the temperature gauge.
Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt, one of the authors of the 2015 paper, says women have less fat-free mass and linked to that they have less heat production", therefore making them uncomfortable in lower temperatures regardless of what they're wearing.
Commenting on their own experiences, one worker said on Reddit: "My office is so cold it's ridiculous. It's so cold it gives me a headache. The guy two desks down from me wears his padded jacket all day. I have fingerless gloves I wear because I have to type fast and if my hands freeze up I get slow. People drink hot water when they run out of hot coffee or tea packets. Our plants die."
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Another added: "The women in my office usually bring in a sweater. Some have a small heater under the desk but that's frowned upon." A third said: "Woman here. At my old job, I had to take frequent breaks from working on the computer/typing to sit on my hands because my fingers got so cold I couldn't feel them. Fun times."
One more added: "I'm curious if men are less likely to vocalise a complaint about something like temperature-related comfort because they think it would be perceived as trivial or weak and they’re socialised to avoid looking weak."
After a new study discovered a woman's productivity goes up along with the temperature, Agne Kajackaite, and her coauthor, economist Tom Y. Chang of the University of Southern California, wanted to see how temperature impacts the workspace.
Speaking about the study, a Popular Science statement reads: "To figure it out, the pair recruited 543 students—about 60 percent of the group was male and the median age was 23. They each attended one of 24 hour-long sessions: during the sessions, they participated in exactly the same cognitive tests (an adding test, a word-building test, and a thinking test).
"The only variable was the room temperature, which was different in each test. The temperature varied from 60.8 degrees Fahrenheit to 89.6 degrees Fahrenheit—well beyond what most people would consider comfortable.
"The tests were designed to be hard to answer fully within the designated time frame (for instance, the math test involved adding a column of five four-digit numbers, and there were a total of 50 questions). What Kajackaite and Chang wanted to see was how far participants would get, and whether the temperature of the room seemed to factor in."
When it comes to the findings, they discovered men didn't perform quite as well in warmer environments, with them correctly answering an average of 0.07 percent fewer math questions per one degree Celsius. However, women performed 1.76 percent better per each increase.
"To put the magnitude of these effects in perspective, the well-known, longstanding gap in performance between high school boys and girls on the math portion of the SAT is approximately four percent." However, the statement adds: "This doesn't mean that employers should rush to adjust their office thermostats.
"After all, this experiment was only an hour long, and participants were demographically similar to one another. Humans being the unique creatures they are—and gender being the complex spectrum it is—it's silly to conclude that some particular temperature will optimise the work performance of all men to the detriment of all women. But the results do suggest that when the temperature is not comfortable, worker morale isn't the only thing that suffers."