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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:28PM (#218586)

    But I was surprised the story about LEGO prostheses didn't get more discussion, because it's really cool and raises a lot of interesting questions about body image and human-ness as we incorporate more technology into our bodies. But, nope, apparently only one other user in the entire SN community found that as interesting as I did.

    I found it interesting. But I didn't have much to comment on. As for body image and humanness - we use tools and after a while they can almost become an extension of our bodies. A pro tennis player hitting a ball no longer thinks "my arm needs to move this way so the thing I'm holding will hit the ball".

    There are plenty of Soylentnews stories that are interesting that I shared with others (outside of Soylentnews) but didn't comment on.

    Just because everyone and his dog can comment on a bikeshed story doesn't mean the bikeshed story is always better than some other story with only a few comments. Of course there were some other stories with few comments that I found uninteresting too. Soylentnews could have a vote up or down for a story if they want better metrics.