Office thermostat is set for men’s comfort, report says
Like well- tailored grey power suits, matte red lipstick and generous pours of whiskey in between meetings, office climate standards are a throwback to the 1960s Mad Men era when males ruled the workplace.
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, 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.
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 30 C outside. Previous studies have shown that women prefer higher room temperatures, but they haven’t had a lot of physiological data to back up their misery — until now.
To try to quantify how big the difference is between the optimal temperature for men vs. women, researchers from Maastrict University in the Netherlands recruited 16 women to sit inside a temperature chamber set at 24 degrees Celsius, on the warmer end of a typical setting for an office.
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 email or reading a book while sitting at a table.
The current standards for office settings assume a metabolic rate that produces a resting heat of 60 to 70 watts per square metre. The researchers estimated that this model overestimated the heat production of women by up to 35 per cent.
Translation: The women were freezing their collective behinds off.
Boris Kingma, a researcher in human biology at Maastricht and the lead author of the study, said it’s time that government officials and building engineers reconsider how they calculate ideal temperatures. Kingma, who studies the impact of indoor environments on a person’s health, said previous studies have shown that when the environment is out of balance with the temperature your body needs, your productivity goes down.
“If you want to describe the thermal demand of a population, then it should be representative of that population,” Kingma said in an interview.
The impact of setting the thermostats too low is not only an issue of individual comfort but one that has major implications for energy usage and the environment. Kingma explained that the problem impacts construction of offices from the design phase. It can dictate where vents are put in, how much insulation is used, how powerful the heater and air conditioners need to be, and how companies estimate their energy bills.
“Because you’re taking a value that only applies to a male, you’ve already made a huge assumption that is a mistake,” he said.
“Current indoor climate standards may intrinsically misrep- resent thermal demand of the female,” Kingma and his co- author Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt wrote.
“Ultimately,” they added, “an accurate representation of thermal demand of all occupants leads to actual energy consumption predictions and real energy savings of buildings.”
If you want to describe the thermal demand of a population, then it should be representative of that population.