Are Women Always Cold?
"Women are always cold — they need the thermostat up and they steal your hoodie."
Women do feel cold at higher ambient temperatures than men. The effect is real, measurable, and rooted in metabolic rate and body-fat distribution. And the standard office thermostat setting was literally calibrated in the 1960s to the comfort zone of a 40-year-old, 154-pound man — which is why offices feel cold to a majority of the workforce now.
What the data says
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Women's basal metabolic rate is ~23% lower than men's after controlling for body weight. The thermoneutral zone (comfort temperature) for women sits ~3°C higher than for men.
Kingma & van Marken Lichtenbelt, Nature Climate Change (2015) · 2015 · Physiology review
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The standard ASHRAE office thermostat formula, developed in the 1960s, uses a metabolic rate calibrated to a 40-year-old 154-pound man — effectively sets offices ~5°F colder than optimal for a typical woman.
Kingma & van Marken Lichtenbelt, Nature Climate Change (2015) · 2015 · Physiology + standards review
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In a 500-person experiment, women in warmer offices performed 27% better on math tests and 14% better on verbal tests; men showed small reductions. Equal performance happens at different temperatures.
Chang & Kajackaite, PLOS ONE (2019) · 2019 · Experimental, 542 participants
Where it came from
The office-temperature gap became a policy conversation with Kingma & van Marken Lichtenbelt's 2015 Nature Climate Change paper, which framed the ASHRAE standard as a gendered calibration artifact. Caroline Criado Perez's *Invisible Women* (2019) popularized the finding to a wider audience.
What this means
This one is real. Women aren't imagining being cold — they're correct, given the environment. The fix isn't telling women to put on a sweater; it's recognizing that the 'default temperature' is a male default, and buildings could (and increasingly do) tune to the mixed occupancy they actually have.
Frequently asked
Are women biologically colder than men?
They run at a lower basal metabolic rate after controlling for body weight, so at the same ambient temperature they feel colder. The effect is ~3°C of thermoneutral-zone difference.
Why do offices feel so cold?
The ASHRAE thermostat formula dates from the 1960s and is calibrated to a 40-year-old, 154-pound man's metabolic rate. Most women sit well below that baseline; many men do too.
Does temperature affect performance?
Yes, and differently by gender. Chang & Kajackaite (2019) found women performed 27% better on math in warmer offices; men's drop was small. Comfort is also productivity.