Thermostat Gender Wars
Hot enough for you? From Memorial Day until the Fourth of July, Americans are happy and proud, as both events are bookended with a salute to our troops over the centuries, our freedoms, dining on burgers while watching fireworks.
It’s the first half of summer when Texans go outside, enjoy the sunshine, find a pool, eat out, vaycay or staycay but acclimate to what is inevitable after the Fourth: That unbearable heat.
Fleeing inside, there is more heat as tempers flare. Yet another study was released in May showing the ongoing war of the sexes at the thermostat.
In the 1960s the commercial buildings were designed to cool the average indoor worker, a white male in his 40s about 155 pounds due to some study. That temperature was determined to be between 65 and 68 degrees where it is set to this day. These temperatures are widely used in churches, government buildings, and movie theaters.
Changes in the workforce and construction design, notwithstanding, money continues to be wasted for refrigerating much of the population despite a study by two Dutch scientists that was widely dispersed in all the major U.S. and British newspapers in 2002. It was reinforced by another study in 2015.
It seems women function ideally at temperatures ranging from 72-77 when identically clothed as men. It’s not whining or hormones when out come the sweaters, jackets, and in some cases, space heaters in July. It’s physiology and something about musculature, white fat versus brown fat, and metabolism, which nobody can explain.
The thermostat is back in the news and again all over TV and newspapers after an article in late May released in PLOS One, a scientific research journal. This time a professor at Southern Cal and another in Berlin discovered unequivocally that women’s test scores rise at 72 plus degrees while men’s fall. Holy cheating parents who paid for their daughters to get into competitive colleges! All they needed to have done was to pay somebody to set the thermostat to 77 degrees.
Will common sense prevail? Nah. I asked for the AC to be turned up at a bridge tournament in a public facility as the gents in charge snickered. I returned the next day with an article on performance and temperature and threatened discrimination. The AC went off as did the women’s fleeces and sweaters. (My score went up.)
Speak up, ladies. Let freedom ring.
