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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?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:34PM
Not only that, the implication is that white men are using their hegemony/privilege/whatever to not only make everyone else uncomfortable and waste energy in the process, wrecking the environment, but that they're happy to pay extra on the power bill to accomplish all this! Somebody get Captain Planet on the horn and show those evil white cis male capitalist oppressors what-for!
What they've effectively done is update a study done another world away back when there was a need for the civil rights movement and feminism with more modern demographics. That's nice and all. However, I really don't understand the social justice angle. They're asserting that the thermostat where you work (presumably this means in a vast majority of office buildings) is set for men's comfort and it's unpossible that anything else might be the case. Yet, they present no data about how thermostats are set in the real world in 2015 to back up this assertion.
Secondly, this raises worries for me about their methodology:
The women, who were an average age of 23 and weight of 144 pounds, wore the equivalent of summer clothing -- underwear, socks, a cotton T-shirt and cotton/polyester sweatpants -- and simulated light office work by sending e-mail or reading a book while sitting at a table.
To take a cheap shot at the waistlines of many in the USA, most women I've met here in flyover country would say 144 lbs is anorexic! If the temperature gets up to 75°F, they'll all get out desk fans. Additionally, the subjects weren't even wearing office attire! What on earth am I supposed to do with these data?
So, in the absence of data and in the presence of questionable methodology, I see their anecdote about the poor, victimized woman freezing to death in her office and raise them 3 anecdotes. First, everywhere I've worked, the thermostat is set by consensus, usually 70°F or 72°F. The folks who pay the electric bill in summer are more than happy to throttle back the AC. Second, yes, sometimes in winter I'll admit I do find it a tad chilly inside, but there are these miraculous things called sweaters, thermal undershirts, long johns, warm cups of tea, etc. (That might even be an argument for women to stop, just stop, going into sales, management, marketing, and HR careers and instead come over here to tech! They'll let you wear a sweater!) Anecdote the 3rd: every winter at home I seem to get into a thermostat war with roommates from demographics who should prefer it cooler than my demographic. Instead, I'll turn it down to 70 or 72, then a few days later I'll break out a sweat doing light exercise to find it's been cranked to 78!
To speak more to your point, what this study does is find that the temperature at which somebody is comfortable depends on a variety of factors. Then, for some reason, TFA goes out into lala land and says that we should privilege demographics that prefer it warmer than other demographics because historically a demographic that prefers it cooler was the dominant demographic in the office. Uh, no? They seem to present no guidance on what a company with ideal diversity should set its thermostat to. So, we have a classic social justice bully piece that offers no solutions or guidance. All it does is heap yet more guilt and blame on a demographic that was, decades ago, dominant in office environments. It doesn't even consider that the average guy on the floor has no say in it and can't do one damned thing about it, which is another sign of social justice bullying. Where are the anecdotes from men who prefer warmer temperatures? Their voices are completely ignored because they're the expendable gender, don't have enough melatonin in their skin, and must be held responsible for decisions made by others who have a superficial physical similarity and ethnic background, to hell with economic class dynamics!
Individuality and reaching consensus like adults—we don't need that! Let's find yet another thing to beat up on those evil white cis male oppressors over!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @04:08PM
There are some things to consider. First of all it's possible to put a heater in a colder room but how exactly do you put an air conditioner in each warmer room? So having the temperature set a tad bit too cold and allowing people to bring their own heaters makes more sense than the other way around.
Secondly it would help the issue a whole lot if each room had its own individual climate control thermostat so that the air conditioning system can keep each room the the desired temperature. Granted people share rooms and so there maybe conflicts but at least this would be better than having one unified colder temperature and wasting more energy on everyone having their own individual heaters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @05:36PM
Its called a "fan"....works great....and a lot cheaper to run than a heater.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @09:01PM
Fans do not cool a room down. Place a thermometer in a room get a reading, then point a fan at it and get another reading. It wont change.
Fans can help cool people by speeding up the evaporation of sweat. If someone is sweating they are stinking.
Get over your self and stop wearing revealing clothing if you are cold. Either that or in the sake of fairness, let men wear t-shirts and shorts.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday August 05 2015, @05:51PM
...the implication is that white men are using their hegemony/privilege/whatever to not only make everyone else uncomfortable and waste energy in the process, wrecking the environment,
I think it's pretty common knowledge that keeping the thermostat lowers actually saves energy. But hey, don't let basic thermodynamics get in the way of your persecution complex.
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday August 05 2015, @07:07PM
Yes, that's true in the winter. I should have been more clear. My apologies. I was mostly reacting to this:
Any female worker who spends time sitting at a desk can tell you that that makes for a wretched day, especially in the summer when air conditioners are on high, and they have to wear wool clothes and run space heaters even when it's 90 degrees outside.
I tried to imagine being one of these women who gets frostbite at 68°F. It must be a tough choice: either dress for winter and then get heatstroke after entering the car at end of the day, or dress for summer and get hypothermia after entering office!
I can only assume the freeze-to-death problem doesn't exist or isn't as severe in winter, since one would need to be insane to wear, say, a sundress while negotiating the two feet of snow that fell overnight and the −20°F wind chill.
As far a persecution complex goes, I'm mostly angry that they'd presume I'd be comfortable at 75°F–77°F without giving me a standard deviation or error bars or some other statistics I might be able to use to determine just how strange of a girl I am! (May also lead to follow-up studies about the effects of Amazon training.)
(Score: 2) by soylentsandor on Thursday August 06 2015, @10:03AM
You do realize this isn't American research, right? As such, your American ideas of average weight or what is and what isn't office attire don't apply.
This does mean however, that the conclusions even if valid don't necessarily apply to the American workplace.
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday August 06 2015, @10:44PM
I am aware of that. Dutch, wasn't it? On the other hand, the Washington Post is a USA newspaper.
This does mean however, that the conclusions even if valid don't necessarily apply to the American workplace.
Go tell that to the gender lunatics when this becomes yet another bullet point for USA (3rd wave) feminists to pull out when they start up about how victimized women are and how guilty all assigned males (even those of us who are women!) should feel. Perhaps you can talk some sense into them.
(Goodness knows I've tried, but apparently the first 7 or so years of my life living as a boy somehow imparts unfathomable privilege, of which I have the privilege of being unaware, to me. Oh, and I've tried the deep stealth approach, too, but I just got accused of having a dick, which didn't make any damned sense to me or my Amazon sisters when I related that to them.)