Record-breaking heat waves have arrived early across Europe and the United States. At the same time, corporate America is pushing workers back into the office full-time. This means another seasonal ritual is returning, too: the office thermostat war.
And it’s a battle of the sexes, one where women are handed a consistent verdict: Better she shivers than he sweats.
For many women, the problem is not simply preference. Modern air-conditioning standards were built around a mid-century model of a male office worker wearing a wool suit. Decades later, most buildings are still calibrated around that assumption, even though the workforce and the dress code have changed.
Every woman knows the look: the whispered “It’s freezing” exchanged in office hallways, conference rooms, restaurants, and hotel ballrooms. Many of us leave home carrying an extra sweater, shawl, or jacket not because the weather outside demands it, but because the buildings we enter will. We drape those extra layers over chairs, stuff them into bags, or pile them beside us at dinner tables. The workaround has become so routine for half the population that it barely registers.
But these small accommodations add up. Every adjustment women make to navigate spaces designed around someone else’s comfort consumes mental bandwidth that most men rarely have to consider. I think of this as a “headspace gap”: the quiet cognitive labor required to adapt to environments that were never designed with women in mind.
Air conditioning is just one example of a broader pattern. Crash test dummies have historically been modeled around male bodies, making women more likely to be injured in car accidents. Personal protective equipment in industries from medicine to construction is often sized around male proportions, leaving women to work in gear that fits poorly and protects inadequately. Again and again, the default human being embedded into design standards turns out to be male.
The same is true of office temperature standards. In the late 1960s, Danish engineer Povl Ole Fanger developed a thermal comfort model, which became foundational to modern HVAC standards. The model relied in part on standardized assumptions about metabolic rate and clothing insulation based on typical office workers of the era—often men wearing a suit jacket, dress shirt, trousers, socks, and dress shoes. The majority of air-conditioned public spaces we occupy today still set the thermostat according to that standard.
The problem is not women’s bodies. It’s the design standards we adhere to as “normal.” And normal almost always means a man.
On average, women and men regulate temperature differently. Although human core body temperatures are similar, how women and men produce and retain heat is quite different, starting with metabolic rates determined by muscle mass and body fat. Men generally have higher muscle mass, which generates more body heat. Women generally have higher body fat, which insulates the body’s core, but reduces heat transfer to the skin, contributing to colder-feeling extremities. Estrogen also influences blood vessel constriction, which affects circulation and temperature regulation in cold environments. These differences help explain why many women experience office temperatures differently, particularly in over-air-conditioned spaces.
These antiquated thermal comfort standards are likely making us all uncomfortable. I believe it’s possible that men are shivering, too.
After all, men are no longer dressing like the “standard” office worker of the 1960s. Three-piece wool suits have largely been replaced by polos, sneakers, cotton shirts, chinos, and T-shirts. The original thermal comfort model assumed layers of insulation that most men no longer wear.
This is what makes the thermostat wars more than a running office joke. They reveal how easily design assumptions can persist for decades after the world that produced them has changed.
And bringing a critical eye to those assumptions can benefit everyone. Lowering excessive air conditioning would not only make many workplaces more comfortable, it would reduce energy use at a moment when electricity demand and cooling costs are soaring.
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