Why the battle of the sexes heats up at work

Women like it hot in the office... men prefer it cold

Turning up the heating at work could give women the edge over their male colleagues.

Women think better at higher temperatures, while men perform better when it is colder, a study found.

When they were asked to do mental arithmetic, women got almost 9 per cent more right when the temperature rose by 5C (9F). They tried harder, making more attempts to get answers – unlike men, who solved 3 per cent fewer tasks correctly when the temperature rose by 5C.

it is well known that women often feel chilly in offices while their male colleagues are sweating. The new findings suggest women do not just need it to be warmer for comfort, but to be able to solve problems efficiently.

The study’s lead author, Tom Chang, associate professor of finance and business economics at the university of Southern California, said: ‘What we found is it’s not just whether you feel comfortable or not, but that your performance is affected by temperature.’

researchers used air conditioning and electric heaters to vary the temperature of a room between 16C (61F) and 33C (91F).

They asked more than 500 participants to do 50 sums, adding up to five two-digit numbers together over five minutes. in another fiveminute task, the participants made as many words as they could out of ten letters.

For every ten words women were able to get in this task, they would guess an additional word with every 10C rise in temperature. But men would get just over half a word less, according to the study published in the journal PLOS One. Experts believe that people make more effort when they are not distracted by being too cold or too warm.

Men are comfortable at a lower temperature, so made fewer guesses in the cognitive tests when it was warmer, and got fewer right.

The study says the results may ‘raise the stakes for the battle of the thermostat’ between the sexes. Professor Chang said: ‘One of the most surprising things we learned is this isn’t about the extremes of temperature. Even if you go from 60 to 75F (15.5 to 24C), which is a relatively normal temperature range, you still see a meaningful variation in performance.’