Frigid offices, freezing women, oblivious men: An air-conditioning investigation
Last edited Sat Jul 25, 2015, 11:59 AM - Edit history (1)
One of the women where I work shares her cubicle with an air exchanger unit. She's so cold that she wears a bathrobe.
Frigid offices, freezing women, oblivious men: An air-conditioning investigation
By Petula Dvorak July 23
Petula.Dvorak@washpost.com
@petulad
You can spot them. The frozen ones who come outside at lunch like sun-seeking turtles, cardigans balled up next to them, bare shoulders defrosting in the noon sunlight, no matter how wilting it is outdoors.
Every single woman I talked to in downtown Washington on a hot, humid July afternoon was thawing out.
“I. Am. Fuh-reezing. Feel my hand — I’m still cold,” said Ruth Marshall, 64, who was seated on a park bench, face to the sky. And, yes, her hand felt like a cold steak.
“I have to come out here for 30 minutes at a time just to warm up,” said Marshall, the director of administration at a construction firm where the air conditioning is set to Arctic.
It’s the time of year desperate women rely on cardigans, pashminas and space heaters to make it through the workweek in their frigid offices. And their male colleagues barely notice.
{Take our poll: Is your office too cold?}
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It's one of the few realms where women have it better: they don't look like clones at work, unless it's by choice 
Formal wear too.
I'm a woman, but tend to run hot. The other women I work with complained so loudly about being cold that our boss bought them all space heaters in our tiny office with only cubicles. Why they all think the heat doesn't travel I'll never know. They run those things in the winter constantly and the rest of us sweat and suffer. But the 3 women that run cold are toasty in their short skirts with bare legs and bare feet in flats and heater running full blast.
Honestly, it's one of the things that makes me look for another job. I'm uncomfortable constantly. I can't take anymore clothes off without being indecent (and we are lucky to have a fairly relaxed dress code).
I told one of the women - who is a friend of mine so I felt comfortable telling her - that she can always put a sweater on, but I cannot take my short sleeved blouse off. She whined about feeling 'cooped up' in a thick sweater. 
The Turtle in his costume:
a fabric option! I've seen it in blue, pink, green, tan--a wide variety of fabrics and colors. It's a weird fabric, because it's kind of wrinkled anyway, so it doesn't show creases as terribly as some other fabrics.
It actually makes a great deal of sense in summer, or it did when people used to wear clothing! Nowadays, everyone uses sunblock and lets it all hang out...!
It might be making a revival...in bolder colors, too...
i cannot comment, because my work attire is generally a jacket, shirt and pants, not sundresses and sandals 
but i am still cold.
so the a/c freezes out the men 
Cher
crap like this
There could actually be something to her rather vague thesis, but she surely doesn't make a strong case,
That is, keep the core of the building at arctic temps, and blow the same arctic air on those oven-like sheets of glass on the outer skin. Then it will just "even out" everywhere. Only that never works. The core remains at arctic temps while the offices with windows remain hot. How much energy is being lost by this ineffective method?
My brother was telling me of a system invented to be not only more efficient but to have even temps over entire floors, using laminar-flow principles. It required having a raised floor and then periodic placement of vertical pillars where the cold air would be released. The drawback was that it didn't work with cubicles and separate offices. I would think it could still work with cubes and offices if you put a pillar in every cube and office. That would certainly be better than having to wear winter clothing in August.
This magazine has an article on two alternative forms of cooling (radiant chilling and chilled beams) that could work better, even in humid environments like here in Houston It starts on page 51 (I couldn't link directly to those pages due to their method for making the issue available.)
Net Zero Buildings - March 2015
I've had the horror of experiencing those symptoms recently. God, I feel for them.
Just you wait 
I can't function without a fan these days. 
...is it really that hard of a concept to grasp? It's something I learned to do by age 20.
Whatever climate one lives in, temperatures vary by indoors vs. outdoors, and also by time of day.
In cold climates in the winter, you won't want to wear your heavy sweater all day indoors or you'll collapse of heat stroke, since most places are heated to a nice cozy temperature. So have a shirt or top under the sweater so you can take the sweater off indoors.
In hot climates in the summer, you'll want to bring a wrap of some sort to your indoor destinations, since they are often chilly compared to the temperatures outside.
In most climates, it is substantially cooler in the morning and in the evening than it is a midday. So , if you will be outside at different times of day, have layers.
Trying to frame this as "poor women" is silly. One could as easily frame it as "oh, those poor men" who have to wear suits with their dress shirts and suit jackets and long pants even on the hottest days of the year, thus being too hot anytime they are outside. They suffer because their rigid dress codes don't allow them the privilege of dressing for the weather -- and their female colleagues barely notice.
The article, while a bit tongue in cheek, did bring up an issue that everyone in the workplace deals with: how to get an ideal office temperature in a big building, where there are lots of different people with different ideas of what the ideal temperature is, and where there is rarely individual control over it.
Now the thermostat is set five degrees higher and the rest of us are sweating it out at nearly 80 degrees.
