Study Finds Outdated Gender Bias In Office Air Conditioning
There's a chill in the air Michael Himbeault/Flickr CC by 2.0 It's the height of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere and in many places that means that while temperatures are soaring outside, inside many office buildings they're plummeting. Why so chilly? It turns out that many offices set their thermostat to a comfort standard that hasn't been updated since the 1960's, the Mad Men era of male-dominated office spaces. A new study published in Nature Climate Change observed the physiology of 16 women working in a typically chilly office and found that their metabolic rate was lower, suggesting to the authors that women in offices might not need the lower temperatures to be comfortable indoors. There are a few caveats, the largest of which being that this is a very small study with only 16...