Is Your Office Always Freezing? Now You Know Who to Blame…

This explains a lot.  A scientific paper published in the journal Natural Climate Change on Monday has addressed a curious phenomenon you may have noticed in your own office. If you spend the week wrapping a blanket around yourself at the desk while your male colleagues strut about in shorts (dress code permitting) it might be because the office is, in fact, designed for the men.   The paper Energy consumption in buildings and female thermal demand, authored by Boris Kingma and Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt, asserts that indoor climate regulations are based on an empirical thermal comfort model that was developed in the 1960s. The standard measure for one of the core variables, metabolic rate, are based only on men and can overstate the average female metabolic rate by up to 35 per cent. Women usually have slower metabolic rates than men, as they are generally smaller and have more body fat. Body fat has a lower metabolic rates than muscle. As stated by the researchers, the current system "may cause buildings to be intrinsically non-energy-efficient in providing comfort to females". After all, this is one thing we do not have in common with Elsa...