Why office A/C wars never end?

Study explains why genders feel differently over office temperatures

As the weather warms up, offices are cranking up the air conditioning.

But with such varying temperature preferences, where should you set the thermostat? It may be an impossible task to find an optimal temperature that suits everyone. So why do we have such different temperature preferences? And does it affect more than our level of comfort? Women tend to prefer a slightly warmer office.

While there are always more similarities than differences between the sexes, women tend to feel the cold more than men.

A 2021 study of more than 38,000 participants found 38% of respondents were dissatisfied with the temperature of their office. Of those dissatisfied, women accounted for nearly two-thirds.

When asked, in other studies, the less satisfied women said they preferred warmer temperatures, while the less satisfied men would prefer a cooler office environment.

Although specifics vary, the optimal office temperature for women is often around 1°C higher than for men. One study reported the optimal temperature was 24°C for women and 23.2°C for men.

Can temperature affect your ability to work?

The room's temperature can impact productivity. In warmer environments (above 25°C), men have been found to perform worse on maths and verbal tasks, while women performed worse on these tasks at cooler temperatures (below 25°C).

But on other tasks, temperature doesn't appear to have an influence. Researchers found no difference to either gender's performance on a number of cognitive tasks, such as cognitive reflection tests (where the questions are such that the intuitive answer is the wrong answer), or cognitive load tasks (where working memory is overloaded).

It is often proposed that concentration can be impacted by temperature, but this is not always the case.