Is your office air conditioning sexist?

We know it’s been an awful summer and the air-conditioning being on too high might not be the top item on your agenda. But maybe it should be, because, as it turns out, air-conditioning is sexist.

And don’t forget, where air-con leads, the office heating follows. In Ireland, the heating is more likely to have us breaking out in a cold sweat, so we should all care about the temperature of our workplaces, because it turns out that men and women have not been operating on a level playing field.

Scientists have found that indoor climate control systems used in offices are based on the resting metabolic rate of an average 40-year-old man.

That man, whoever he is (and remember he could be sitting right next to you), is likely to feel more comfortable at a lower temperature than women. This is according to Dr Boris Kingma and Prof Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt of the Maastricht University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, who have just published their study on the matter.

You might think that people getting heated over the air-con in hotter places may be none of your concern. You would be wrong. Cooped-up office workers in Ireland need air too, so the fact that your office’s indoor climate control system is taking no notice whatsoever of anyone’s gender means that it is not only the heat around the photocopier that may be oppressive.

A study of 16 young women performing light office work showed that they were at risk of being over-chilled by air conditioning in summer, as Kingma and van Marken Lichtenbelt report this week in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The metabolic rates of the sample women were significantly lower than the “standard values” currently employed to set office temperatures. Therefore, women needed less cooling in summer than men.

Current air-conditioning standards are derived from research conducted in the 1960s which examined the “thermal comfort” of 1,300 mainly sedentary students. Those standards used a metabolic rate that was based on the resting metabolic rate of one 70kg (11 stone) 40-year-old man.

As one might expect, women’s metabolic rates are typically very different from men’s. The Dutch study found that this was indeed the case, although asking any menopausal women would have probably delivered the same results.

Worse still – and this will send a chill down the spines of 51 per cent of the population – the standard model used to set indoor temperatures may overestimate the amount of heat a woman generates while sitting still by up to 35 per cent, the researchers say.

The study found that “women tend to be cooler than men in cool conditions” and are “more sensitive than men to fluctuations in the optimum temperature.” Older people are also cooler.

“Current indoor climate standards may intrinsically misrepresent thermal demand of the female and senior sub-populations,” the study’s authors write.

Office heating and cooling systems were therefore likely to be “less energy efficient than they could be,” they add, before calling for a new system that takes into account gender differences, as well as age and physiological characteristics such as being lean or obese.

Of course, money talks and the gender playing field may yet be levelled by the bottom line.

“Thermal comfort models need to adjust the current metabolic standard by including the actual values for females,” the authors say. “This in turn will allow for better predictions of building energy consumption.”

The gender comfort disparity had never been factored into the design of building thermal systems, they note, before calling for a “large scale re-evaluation” of the area.

Meanwhile, lads, if you could just turn the air-conditioning down a bit.