Marianne Touchie is no stranger to chilly workplaces. In the height of summer, when her office’s air conditioning was on full blast, Touchie would shiver under layers of sweaters and shawls while her male colleagues walked about in T-shirts.
On one particularly frigid day, the University of É«É«À² professor even shoved a plastic bag in her office’s air diffuser to limit the air flow — a cardinal sin for a building scientist like herself.
“That’s a really bad practice,” Touchie told the Star, adding that she removed it as soon as the workday was done. “I knew it was wrong, but I was that desperate. (The cold) makes it really impossible to concentrate and to work effectively.”
The city and much of the province are experiencing the first heat wave of the summer as temperatures are expected to soar to the mid-30s.Â
The city and much of the province are experiencing the first heat wave of the summer as temperatures are expected to soar to the mid-30s.Â
She’s far from alone. with the office A/C, especially when it’s cranked up on summer days. More locally, Â found nearly four times more women than men felt their office was too cold during the summer.
That’s partly because the regulations were made with men in mind.Â
 many office climate-control systems are based on a six-decade-old model centred on the resting metabolic rate of a 154-pound, 40-year-old male.
“We know so much less about women, because nearly all of our data — in any sphere — is based on usually white, young males,” said Toby Mündel, the Canada research chair in extreme human environments and a professor at Brock University.Â
When these data inform policies, he said, people who don’t fit the mould fall through the gaps.Â
Why do women get cold faster than men?
Biological females are generally more sensitive to cold than biological males, for multiple reasons.
“Men tend to be heavier, women tend to be lighter. Men tend to have more muscle, women tend to have more fat,” Mündel said. “Muscle is the compartment in the body which creates heat ... So if you have less muscle, then by default you’re generally warming up less from the inside.”
Female bodies also tend to store more fat just under the skin — meaning blood has longer to travel before it can reach and warm the skin surface. “That’s a reason why, typically, women’s skin is about a degree cooler than men,” Mündel explained.
In some cases, heatstroke can even result in permanent neurological damage, doctors tell the Star.
In some cases, heatstroke can even result in permanent neurological damage, doctors tell the Star.
Additionally, the menstrual cycle can cause one’s body temperature to fluctuate. The two key hormones in the cycle, estrogen and progesterone, , respectively. As these chemical messengers rise and fall with the time of the month, so too does the body’s temperature.
On a cultural level, the clothes we wear to work can play an outsized role, said Peter Crank, an assistant professor researching urban climate at the University of Waterloo.
“Traditional workplace attire expected men to be in full suits and ties. Women were expected to be in dresses. The clothing expectations provided drastically different thermal comfort levels at the same air temperature,” Crank said in an email.
“The office was designed for the men in full suits and therefore temperatures were set accordingly.”
Why are offices so chilly?
offices set their thermostats to 24.5 C in the summer, with an acceptable range of 23 to 26 C.
But in the height of summer, many workplaces tend to go overboard, with some offices going as low as 20 C, .
It can be a common consequence of buildings overcompensating when switching from heating in the winter to cooling in the summer, Mündel explained. “It’s purely an engineering mechanism,” he said. “Unless you have newly built air conditioning units and heating, it’s a problem.”
Customers say Provincial Smart É«É«À² Services misrepresented loans and promised rebates that never arrived. Company co-owner refutes the
Customers say Provincial Smart É«É«À² Services misrepresented loans and promised rebates that never arrived. Company co-owner refutes the
The extra cooling requires extra energy, produces extra greenhouse gas emissions and racks up extra costs for the company. And that’s not counting the productivity costs;Â one study suggests women in cooler temperatures than warm.Â
The study noted an opposite relationship was observed in men — although this difference in performance was less pronounced.Â
What can we do about it?
In reality, there is no perfect temperature for everyone. We all have a different tolerance for warmth and cooling, informed by our unique physiologies and cultural backgrounds, the experts say.
The rise of personal comfort systems might provide an answer to this dilemma, Touchie noted.
The idea revolves around providing customizable ventilation, heating and cooling at the desk level — think heated or cooled chairs, fans pointed at workers’ heads and feet, or even thermal wearables.
Instead of overcooling in the summer, office buildings with these systems in place can set their thermostats higher and leave workers who feel too warm to cool off at their desks, Touchie explained.
While it might be a pricey investment at first, Touchie believes the system will lead to greater savings in the long run. Widening the thermostat’s dead-band by just one degree Celsius, for example, can reduce a building’s total energy consumption by five to 15 per cent, .
“If we’re all reducing our demand across all of these commercial office spaces, that means there’s more cooling capacity for everybody else,” Touchie said.
“As we get hotter and hotter climates with climate change, we’re going to see much a greater draw on our electricity grid,” she continued. “This measure of reducing energy consumption, particularly in the summer, is actually a pathway to greater resilience as well ... It will keep our grid going when we need it most.”
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