Chilly at Work?

Office Formula Was Devised for Men - The New York Times

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SCIENCE

Chilly at Work? Office Formula Was

Devised for Men
By PAM BELLUCK

AUG. 3, 2015

Summers are hot in Omaha, where heat indexes can top 100 degrees. But Molly
Mahannah is prepared.
At the office, she bundles up in cardigans or an oversized sweatshirt from her
file drawer. Then, she says, I have a huge blanket at my desk that Ive got myself
wrapped in like a burrito. Recently, I was so cold, I was like Im just going to sit
in my car in like 100-degree heat for like five minutes, and bake.
Ms. Mahannah, 24, who posted on Twitter that at work she felt like an icy
White Walker from Game of Thrones, said a female co-worker at her digital
marketing agency cloaked herself in sweaters, too. But the men? Theyre in, like,
shorts.

Molly Mahannah

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@mollymahannah

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Chilly at Work? Office Formula Was Devised for Men - The New York Times

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Right. It happens every summer: Offices turn on the air-conditioning, and

women freeze into Popsicles.
Finally, scientists (two men, for the record) are urging an end to the Great
Arctic Office Conspiracy. 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.
In a lot of buildings, you see energy consumption is a lot higher because the
standard is calibrated for mens body heat production, said Boris Kingma, a coauthor of the study and a biophysicist at Maastricht University Medical Center in
the Netherlands. If you have a more accurate view of the thermal demand of the
people inside, then you can design the building so that you are wasting a lot less
energy, and that means the carbon dioxide emission is less.
The study says most building thermostats follow a thermal comfort model
that was developed in the 1960s, which considers factors like air temperature, air
speed, vapor pressure and clothing insulation, using a version of Fangers thermal
comfort equation.
PMV = [0.303e-0.036M + 0.028]{(M W) 3.96E-8cl[(tcl + 273)4 (tr + 273)
4

] clhc(tcl ta) 3.05[5.73 0.007(M W) pa] 0.42[(M W) 58.15]

0.0173M(5.87 pa) 0.0014M(34 ta)}

It is converted to a seven-point scale and compared against the Predicted
Percentage Dissatisfied, a gauge of how many people are likely to feel
uncomfortably cool or warm.
Seems simple enough.
But Dr. Kingma and his colleague, Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt, write
that one variable in the formula, resting metabolic rate (how fast we generate
heat), is based on a 40-year-old man weighing about 154 pounds.

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Chilly at Work? Office Formula Was Devised for Men - The New York Times

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Maybe that man once represented most people in offices. But women now
constitute half of the work force 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. Indeed, the study says, the current model may
overestimate resting heat production of women by up to 35 percent.
If women have lower need for cooling it actually means you can save energy,
because right now were just cooling for this male population, said Joost van
Hoof, a building physicist at Fontys University of Applied Sciences in the
Netherlands, who was not involved in the study.
Many men think that women are just nagging, he said. But its because of
their physiology.
Physiology and clothing. The authors also note that the model is not always
calibrated accurately for womens summer wardrobes. Dr. van Hoof, who wrote a
commentary about the study, observed that many men still wear suits and ties in
the summer but many women wear skirts, sandals and other lighter, more skinbaring clothes.
The cleavage is closer to the core of the body, so the temperature difference
between the air temperature and the body temperature there is higher when its
cold, he said.
So for the planets sake, men should stop complaining, Dr. Kingma said. If
it is too warm, the behavior thing you can do is take off a piece of clothing, but
you can only do that so much. You could also say lets keep it a very cold building
and women should just wear more clothes.
But his study offers another solution: Change the formula.
The researchers tested 16 women, students in their 20s, doing seated work
wearing light clothes in rooms called respiration chambers, which track oxygen
inhaled and carbon dioxide exhaled. Skin temperature was measured on hands,
the abdomen and elsewhere. A thermometer pill the women swallowed reported
internal body temperature.
Researchers found the womens average metabolic rate was 20 to 32 percent
lower than rates in the standard chart used to set building temperature. So they

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Chilly at Work? Office Formula Was Devised for Men - The New York Times

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propose adjusting the model to include actual metabolic rates of women and men,
plus factors like body tissue insulation, not just clothing. For example, people
who weigh more get warmer faster, and older people have slower metabolic rates,
the study reported.
How much warmer an office would become would vary, of course, but the
study cites research finding as much as a five-degree difference in women and
mens preferences. Dr. Kingma said a woman might prefer a 75-degree room,
while a man might prefer about 70 degrees, which Dr. Kingma said is a common
current office temperature.
Some experts doubt the proposed formula would be easily adopted.
Khee Poh Lam, an architecture professor at Carnegie Mellon, said even if the
industry accepted a change to the longstanding model, buildings often house
different businesses or squeeze more people in than they were designed for and
partition offices so thermostats and vents are in different rooms. Given these
improvisations, he added, whether this actually affects energy, I think thats a
big leap.
Still, he said, we need to keep pushing for improvements because the
phenomenon of women getting cold is very, very obvious, and cold or hot
employees are less productive.
Individualized temperature controls are the eventual answer, said Dr. Lam,
who helped design a personal environmental module in the 1990s that was
deemed too expensive for commercial development. Now others are developing
systems to let workers make their cubicles warmer or cooler.
Kimberly Mark, 31, would appreciate that. This summer, at a software
company in Natick, Mass., she and female colleagues are using space heaters. The
thermostat is in the office of the guy next to me, she said, and Im the only
woman in the offices that he controls.
Phoebe McPherson, 21, said she sometimes wears thick leggings, a longsleeve shirt, a sweatshirt and motorcycle boots to work at a health technology
startup in Reston, Va. She often adds a tartan blanket, wraps a blanket around
my legs, and despite the glaring fashion faux pas, wears a Snuggie backward to
seal off any openings.

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Chilly at Work? Office Formula Was Devised for Men - The New York Times

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I wore a dress once and had to go change, said Ms. McPherson, who
attended college in New Hampshire. While male colleagues wear T-shirts, Im
bringing all my New Hampshire clothes to work. And when that and hot coffee
fail, she nuzzles against a white fake-fur wall in the office, just to feel my skin
warming up against the fur.
Ashaki Lloyd contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on August 4, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with
the headline: Chilly at Work? Icy Office Was Devised for Men.

2015 The New York Times Company

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