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Your Office Thermostat is Set for Men's Comfort. Here's the Scientific Proof.

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @12:18PM   Printer-friendly

Phoenix666 writes:

Temperatures are set based on formulas that aimed to optimize employees' thermal comfort, a neutral condition of the body when it doesn't have to shiver to produce heat because it's too cold or sweat because it's too hot. It's based on four environmental factors: air temperature, radiant temperature, air velocity and humidity. And two personal factors: clothing and metabolic rate, the amount of energy required by the body to function.

The problem, according to a study in Nature Climate Change on Monday, is that metabolic rates can vary widely across humans based on a number of factors -- size, weight, age, fitness level and the type of work being done -- and today's standards are based on the assumption that every worker is, you guessed it, a man.

Or if you want to be really specific, a 40-year-old, 154-pound man.
...
Kingma and van Marken Lictenbelt's work builds on research out of Japan which found that the neutral temperature for Japanese women was 77.36 degrees (Fahrenheit) while it was 71.78 for European and North American males.

5.58 degrees is a significant difference. Is it better for half the people in the office to be sweaty than half the people in the office to be chilly?

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by zocalo on Wednesday August 05 2015, @01:31PM

    by zocalo (302) on Wednesday August 05 2015, @01:31PM (#218492)
    So complain about how hot it is, strip down to shorts and T-shirt, and then see how much gagging at your pale hairy legs they can take before they get the message. After all, women have fought for years for equal rights, and that's a two way street is it not?
    --
    UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:00PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:00PM (#218564) Journal

    Yes, that looks something like this [youtube.com].

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.