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

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: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday August 05 2015, @11:50PM

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Wednesday August 05 2015, @11:50PM (#218853) Journal

    We're going way off topic, but you raise a point that bugs me. In Amazon tribes, it's the duty of every able-bodied woman to defend the tribe from aggressors and to rebuild after environmental disasters.

    More prosaically, Heinlein wrote in Starship Troopers (I confess I haven't read it yet and only know the deliciously campy movie version):

    When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.

    While I wasn't unaware that women were not held to the same standard outside of Amazon law (I wasn't born an Amazon), I was, however, shocked to the extent that this discrepancy didn't even enter into the minds of the feminists I was required to read in college. Perhaps more excusable (more surprising than shocking), is that while this discrepancy comes up for MRAs, the obvious solution, bringing gender equality to Selective Service, doesn't seem to have a lot of support in those circles, either.

    (All though, I did learn an adequate explanation from my mentors back in Qinghai: many women are happy being weak, taking pride in being the mysterious, fair gender, exclusively connected to the Door of Guf. Eh, who am I to argue with them? As I've been researching submissions, I've found that there may be some upcoming tensions among Western women in what, exactly, feminism should be for.)