Now that 2025 has become a heatwave summer, men and women have recommenced their traditional air conditioning wars. While there are exceptions, men tend to prefer their environments at a cooler temperature than women, and nowhere is this more noticeable than in the office in the middle of a British summer. Individual workers often have little control over their office environment. But the thermostat will have been programmed to aim for a certain temperature by someone, and that person may well have been a man. That’s bad news for women. There are three reasons we tend to prefer things a degree or two warmer. (Photo: AndreyPopov/Getty/iStockphoto)

Muscle mass and surface area

One is that women are just smaller and less muscular. Muscle tissue is one of the body’s main contributors to heat generation, through the metabolism, which is the chemical reactions that take place inside cells. All our cells, but especially our muscle cells, are constantly burning glucose molecules to release energy, and that releases heat as a byproduct, which contributes to maintaining our normal body temperature of about 37°C. “The difference between men and women is mainly due to body size and body composition,” said Dr Boris Kingma, a thermal physiologist at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research. “A gram of muscle from a man has the same metabolic rate as a gram from a woman. But men have more muscle.” (Photo: Mireya Acierto/Getty)

A similar effect to overheating in elephants?

Women’s smaller size has a further chilling effect (literally). Smaller objects in general have more surface area for their volume, and the surface is where heat is lost through thermal radiation. “It’s a double whammy,” said Dr Kingma. Women are literally giving away our precious heat into thin air – where it is probably absorbed by men. This is also why elephants can be in danger of overheating, while tiny shrews need to have extremely high metabolic rates, proportionately speaking. As a sign of just how high, a shrew’s heart rate is more than one thousand beats per minute. (Photo: Tony Karumba/AFP via Getty)

Cooler clothing styles

Put these factors together and that’s probably why under laboratory conditions, women need a temperature one to two degrees higher than men before they report feeling “thermal comfort”, said Dr Matt Maley, a physiologist at Loughborough University. There’s a third reason why women suffer more from the cold, but this may elicit less sympathy from male readers. It’s because office fashion tends to be tolerant of cooler clothing styles for women. And in the height of summer, some of us take full advantage. The only way to cope with stifling commutes is to lean in to strappy tops, floaty dresses and summer sandals. Such attire then leaves us shivering when we sit at a desk all day in a building where the thermostat is set to a brutal 19°C. (Photo: Luis Alvarez/Getty/Digital Vision)

Sexist assumptions baked into building design

Sexist assumptions are so baked into building design that the standard unit for measuring clothing warmth, 1 “clo unit”, is equivalent to a man wearing a three-piece suit – waistcoat included. “That was what you were expected to wear, and be thermally neutral,” said Dr Maley. Compare and contrast that get-up to the outfits of your female colleagues today, and our discomfort is understandable. Of course, some men are increasingly experimenting with more casual styles, like short-sleeved shirts, with a few daring individuals even breaking out into shorts. If men feel more comfortable about exposing skin, like we can, it boosts the chances that the office thermostat will be allowed to nudge up half a degree or so. (Photo: Getty/Tetra Images RF)