Do women feel the cold more than men?

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Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We demand to to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Hello, and thanks for downloading the More Or Less podcast.

We're the program that looks at the numbers in the news, life, and communal work environments.

And I'm Lizzie McNeil.

Now, we're recording this in the BBC's offices in Broadcasting House in London.

And I've got a complaint to make.

It's the middle of summer, but for some reason, the office's temperature has been set to the ideal resting temperature of a bag of frozen peas.

I could be exaggerating.

Whatever.

It's chilly.

At least I think it is.

Although some of my colleagues are wearing shorts, it's madness.

But it's not just me that thinks this.

In fact, summertime in the office is jokingly known as women's winter, as demonstrated here in a viral video from comedy group Dropout.

I don't know.

I'm pretty comfortable.

A quick Google will show you plenty of headlines talking about this and claiming that women prefer temperatures up to 2.5 degrees warmer than men.

But is this true?

And if so, why?

The research is quite clear on this.

We have seen that women have a higher prevalence of being uncomfortable because they are cold in the office place.

That's Gail Breger, director of the Center for Environmental Design Research at UC Berkeley.

We've done general satisfaction surveys.

in buildings and we have found in those that 24% of complaints of cold temperatures are coming coming from men, and three-quarters of the complaints about people being dissatisfied due to being too cold are coming from women.

It's not always clear why, but there are some hypotheses about that.

So what are these kind of hypotheses, if we could just go over them quite quickly?

So I think one of the ones that's gotten a lot of attention recently is about the difference in metabolic rate between men and women.

Just a quick recap of some basic science here.

The metabolic rate is the amount of energy an organism, that's a person, uses to carry out basic bodily functions like breathing, moving, etc.

All of these processes also produce heat, and the faster the metabolism, the more energy required, and the more heat is produced.

So, higher metabolic rate equals hotter.

Got it?

Right, as you were.

Men have a higher metabolic rate.

So, women are smaller.

We have more body fat physiologically, which has a lower metabolic rate than muscle.

So men have more muscle, women have more body fat.

So women have a lower metabolic rate.

Now women also tend to have a higher surface area to mass ratio, which means more heat loss per unit of body mass, which is also going to contribute to a greater sensation of cold, especially when they're in sedentary situations like doing desk work.

Men are generating more heat, then at the same temperature, they will feel warmer than women will.

So that's the theory.

And it does have some decent research behind it.

Boris Kingmer, a senior researcher at CNO, the Netherlands Applied Research Institute, devised a study to try and better calculate women's metabolic rate.

He got 16 women women in their 20s to sit in a respiration chamber.

These are special rooms which track air inhalation and atmospheric temperature.

He also asked participants to swallow a thermometer pill to measure internal body temperature.

He then checked his findings against the standard figures for metabolic rates, which, as it happens, are used by businesses to work out office temperatures.

And if you look into standard values for that metabolic rate, at the time that we were writing the the paper, that was a solid 60 watts per square meter.

That was the value.

You would use that for your entire population.

Now, watts per square meter sounds a really bizarre way to measure heat.

It basically means how much energy, aka heat, a person's body produces per unit of surface area, aka their body.

Boris found that the amount of heat women produce in relation to their size has been vastly overestimated.

We were having young adult women.

They have a measured metabolic rate of 48 watt per square meter, which is considerably lower.

Around 20% lower.

So, tales are true.

Women's winter does exist.

Excellent.

Although, not excellent at all.

We're all still chilly.

Boris says that the typical temperature for an office in the UK or the Netherlands will typically be between 22 and 24 degrees.

We checked, and our office, New Broadcasting House, is allegedly set to 23 degrees.

The numbers in the US are also similar.

Gail says this is one degree colder than women would prefer.

For typical office attire, men might prefer temperatures in the 21 to 23 C range and women in the 24 to 26 range.

There might be a three degrees Celsius difference with women wanting warmer temperatures.

So, can we just set the thermostat to around 24 to 26 degrees centigrade and assume all women will be happy?

Alas, no.

You see, even though women are predisposed to feeling colder, it doesn't mean that they actually do.

Individuals will be different.

And what's more, age and hormones play a big role in metabolic rate, especially estrogen.

And the menopause is typically, of course, a period where that would change with the hot flashes.

When estrogen levels drop, it can confuse the part of your brain that essentially acts as the body's thermostat, making it think the body is overheating.

This triggers a hot flush to cool it down.

This is typically associated with menopause, but can happen at any time in a woman's cycle when estrogen levels change.

It's super fun.

There are indications that that will change.

Also, during pregnancy, the thermal sensation may change.

And it all has to do, princess, with how the hormones influence the circulation and how much blood flow is going to the skin.

Another issue that isn't to do with physiology is clothing, specifically societal expectations and demands.

Men are often required to wear suits and long trousers.

This will make them more likely to overheat.

Women are often encouraged to wear dresses or skirts and this will make them more susceptible to cold.

What you get here is a compounding effect of physiological difference mixed with societal expectations, all adding up to make women a bit chilly.

Something that's really quite silly is that offices tend to be colder in the summer when people are wearing lighter clothes than in winter.

In U.S.

office buildings, temperatures tend to be lower in summer than they are in winter, which not only is counter to what the standards suggest, but it just doesn't even make sense.

So we're using even more energy to make people more uncomfortable.

We know that that's a fact, we're not exactly sure why that happens.

This isn't only impractical for workers, it's really wasteful from an energy point of view.

But what can be done?

We allow people to adapt more to the situation.

And that's actually what they do in Japan.

The temperatures in offices, they are set to 26 or 27 degrees.

And the only way to be able to cope with that is if you have more freedom to adapt your clothing to that.

So the government has then initiated a policy of super cool base, which allows workers to come without a suit to the office but for instance with shorts and short sleeves so you are more adapted to it.

The simplest thing we can do is raise the temperature and then give people low energy desk fans which provides fast acting personally controlled comfort.

And that is one of the best things we can do to simultaneously save energy and provide comfort to more people in the office space.

So does Women's Winter exist?

Yes, but not for every woman all the time.

Probably best to keep a blanket handy and for heaven's sake, let the men wear shorts.

And that's all we have time for this week.

If you see any suspicious stats, please let us know at more or less at bbc.co.uk.

Until next week, goodbye.

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Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.