Yes, It’s True: Women Really Are Freezing Their Tails Off at Work

The cold-office struggle is real. (GIF: smileylataytay.tumblr.com)

If you’re a woman and feel like you’re entering the Arctic every time you step foot in your office during the summer, you’re not imagining it. According to a new study published in the journal Nature, there’s a logical reason for why temps are more on the frigid side in buildings: The temperature is set for a man’s metabolism, using a decades-old formula.

Women really are freezing. A couple weeks back, Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak penned a piece that caused a major stir on the interwebs. After interviewing local male and female office workers, the conclusion was clear: While women are armed for an Ice Age when they go to work each day in the summer, men are pretty cool with the temperatures (pun absolutely intended).

The new research that dropped this week examines the gender discrepancy and how it might be fixed. Boris Kingma, a postdoctoral researcher and biophysicist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, is part of a research group that looks at the effects of mild temperature variations. “Imagine that in a mild cold environment, your body has to produce more heat to keep its core temperature steady,” he tells Yahoo Health about his work. “In a mild hot environment, your body has to sweat.”

Temperature fluctuations cause the body to react, and the team studies how mild temperature changes affect facets of health — for example, colleague Mark Hanssen recently showed mild cold exposure may boost insulin sensitivity in those with Type 2 diabetes.

As a biophysicist, Kingma models what constitutes “mild hot” and “mild cold” for each individual, taking into account the person’s body composition and actual metabolic rate. “Because we spend a lot of time inside buildings, they practically define our thermal environment, with a possible influence on health,” he explains. “That’s why we are interested in the building environment.”

Specifically, they were interested in women, since every woman seems to be f-r-e-e-z-i-n-g when she steps into a building. In the new study, they measured variables such as metabolic rate, skin temperature, and core temperature in 16 twenty-something women doing light office work in climate chambers. In addition, they took data on environmental conditions, such as air temperature and relative humidity.

Related: Are Women More Sensitive to Cold Than Men?

From there, Kingma and his colleagues developed a model to show the thermal conditions where women would be most comfortable. “We combined the heat transfer inside the body with heat transfer outside the body, to find what environmental conditions the body is able to sustain a stable core temperature without sweating or shivering,” he explains.

To complete the model, they used a derivative of Fanger’s thermal comfort equation. But per previous standards developed in the 1960s, Kingma and co-researcher Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt discovered that most buildings are set to accommodate the thermal demands of a 40-year-old man weighing 154 pounds. This setting would overshoot the female metabolic rate by 25 to 35 percent, leaving a lot of ladies really, really cold.

“We did not really expect this,” Kingma says. “But it made us realize the building standards might be using not the right values for metabolic rates for all people.”

Related: 10 Reasons You Feel Cold All The Time

Using the stats from their study, the team was able to predict “the thermoneutral zone” closer to that of the average woman. How different are these happy temps across genders? For example, according to The New York Times’ investigation on building temps, a man might prefer a 70-degree office environment while his female co-worker is most comfortable at 75 degrees.

Industry experts say getting people on board with a large-scale temperature adjustment would be a big undertaking, and not well accepted; buildings often have various businesses with different worker populations, and usually prepare to house people at over-capacity. But Kingma says a better examination of the average office worker, while adjusting temperatures accordingly, might be beneficial for energy expenditures and overall comfort.

“Basically, if you have a better view of the metabolic rates of the people in your building, you can better estimate the thermal demand,” he explains. “And if you efficiently tune the thermal supply to the actual thermal demand, you waste less energy.”

And you would have fewer women feeling as though they’re stepping into igloos disguised as offices from late May through early September.

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