The New York Times is reporting on “The Great Arctic Office Conspiracy”, which “happens every summer: offices turn on the air-conditioning, and women freeze into Popsicles.”
Slowly becoming this at the office today. (It’s freezing.) pic.twitter.com/VEVavT3Cru
— Molly Mahannah (@mollymahannah) June 29, 2015
An end to the annual office freeze out may be in sight if two scientists hoping to curb climate change have anything to say about it.
“Their study, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, says that most office buildings set temperatures based on a decades-old formula that uses the metabolic rates of men. The study concludes that buildings should “reduce gender-discriminating bias in thermal comfort” because setting temperatures at slightly warmer levels can help combat global warming.”
“Gender-discriminating bias in thermal comfort”— now there’s a good line to drop at your next meeting.
Times have changed and a new way of calculating for comfort should take new demographics into consideration, as the article points out:
“Maybe [the 40 year-old, 154 pound man used the original calculation] once represented most people in offices. But women now constitute half of the workforce and usually have slower metabolic rates than men, mostly because they are smaller and have more body fat, which has lower metabolic rates than muscle.”
You can find the article to print off and leave in the break room here.
