The thermostat was the tell

Working through the ‘women are always cold’ entry was a small landmark for the Atlas. The popular framing of it is a sitcom premise: she steals his hoodie, he sighs, the joke writes itself. The data is a stranger story. The standard formula office buildings use to set indoor temperature was developed in the 1960s and tuned to a 40-year-old, 154-pound man. Half the workforce is colder than the building expects. We’ve been measuring women’s discomfort for sixty years and calling it preference. This is what we mean when we say a stereotype rests on infrastructure. Not metaphor — actual ductwork, actual setpoints, actual comfort calibrated to one body. If you’re going to argue with a stereotype, look at the building first.