Science confirms what women already knew: warm offices mean better work

So there’s a study now that says women do better work when they aren’t freezing to death at their desks. And I have to be honest — I don’t know whether to be relieved that science finally caught up, or annoyed it took this long to bother asking.

We have known this. Every woman who has ever shoved a cardigan into her work bag in July has known this. Every woman who keeps a blanket in her desk drawer like it’s a survival kit has known this.

And yet here we are, still setting office thermostats to settings that, turns out, were never designed with women in mind.

What did the study actually find?

Researchers at USC and the Berlin Social Science Center looked at about 500 people asked to perform math, verbal, and cognitive reflection tasks — all at different indoor temperatures. The results, published in PLOS ONE, were pretty clear: women performed better on math and verbal tasks at warmer temperatures. Men performed better at cooler ones.

Not slightly better. Meaningfully better.

So the temperature of the room you’re sitting in isn’t just a comfort issue. It’s a performance issue.

Why are women colder in the first place?

Here’s the thing — men and women actually have roughly the same core body temperature. Some studies even put women’s core temp slightly higher. So why are we always the ones wrapping ourselves in layers indoors?

Skin temperature. Women tend to run colder at the skin level, largely due to hormones. And it’s skin temperature — not core temperature — that drives how cold you actually feel.

That’s why the thermostat debate isn’t just women being dramatic. There’s a real, physiological reason.

Are offices actually built around men’s comfort?

Yes — and this isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s just what the research says. A 2015 paper published in Nature Climate Change found that the standard thermal comfort model used to set most office thermostats was developed in the 1960s based on the metabolic rate of a 40-year-old, 154-pound man.

That model, according to the researchers, is “intrinsically non-energy-efficient in providing comfort to females.”

So the baseline was never neutral. It was just assumed to be.

Okay but what’s the actual fix here?

This is where I want to flip a table just a little, because the solution is so obvious it’s almost embarrassing. Warmer offices. Space heaters. Desk blankets. Some flexibility in how temperature is managed across different zones of a building.

None of that is revolutionary. None of it is expensive relative to, say, the cost of women consistently underperforming because they’re sitting at 66 degrees trying to think.

And look — I get that some men genuinely work better in cooler temps. The study supports that too. But what does it say that the default has always been calibrated to one group’s comfort and nobody questioned it for sixty years?

But what do I know. I’m just over here with a cardigan and a heating pad, trying to finish a spreadsheet.

Does anyone actually push back on this?

Some people argue the performance gap is small enough that changing building-wide HVAC systems isn’t cost-effective. That’s a reasonable point on its face — retrofitting old office buildings is genuinely expensive, and facilities managers aren’t going to overhaul infrastructure based on one study.

But the counter-argument isn’t “tear out all the ductwork.” It’s “maybe give people a personal heater and stop treating cold offices as the neutral professional default.” Those are not the same ask.

And honestly, if you’re already thinking about how workplaces can do better by women in general, this is about the lowest-hanging fruit there is. Plug it in. Done.

So what now?

If you work somewhere that keeps it arctic and you’ve been quietly suffering through it — this is your peer-reviewed permission slip to say something. The research backs you up.

And if you manage people, or you’re the one who controls the thermostat — worth knowing that the temperature of your office might actually be affecting how well half your team can think. That’s not small. That’s a real thing with a real, published study behind it.

I wrote a while back about the weird double standards women still navigate at work and this kind of thing is exactly what I was talking about. The invisible stuff. The stuff nobody thinks to question because it was never set up with everyone in mind.

Warm your people up. It’s not that deep.

The fact that we needed a peer-reviewed study for this is both funny and a little infuriating. Women have been saying they’re cold at work since offices existed. Now we have data.

Maybe now someone will listen. Or at the very least, spring for a space heater.

Either way, I’m keeping the blanket.

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