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If you work in an office, you know you’ve had this debate before: The Hot vs. Cold dilemma between your fellow employees. Some like it to be as cold as a meat locker, others prefer it so warm that people would probably start stripping their clothes away (but please don’t do that in your place of employment).
And doesn’t it seem like a lot of the time it’s the women at work who wish it were warmer? Who are always grabbing an extra shawl or two?
Well, it turns out those ladies who are gripe about freezing cold offices have a point – and not the one you may think.
Photo Credit: Max Pixel
A new study concludes that women are actually more productive when they are warm. Take that, male workers who are always messing with the thermostat!
The study was conducted in Berlin, Germany, and saw over 500 participants perform tasks in an environment where the temperature fluctuated between 61 and 91 degrees.
The higher the temperature was, the more productive women became. As you can probably guess, men performed better when the temperature was cooler.
Photo Credit: Pixnio
One of the study’s co-authors, Tom Chang, said,
“It’s been documented that women like warmer indoor temperatures than men, but the idea until now has been that it’s a matter of personal preference. What we found is it’s not just whether you feel comfortable or not, but that your performance on things that matter — in math and verbal dimensions, and how hard you try — is affected by temperature.”
Chang also added, “One of the most surprising things we learned is this isn’t about the extremes of temperature. It’s not like we’re getting to freezing or boiling hot. Even if you go from 60 to 75 degrees, which is a relatively normal temperature range, you still see a meaningful variation in performance.”
Photo Credit: pxhere
The tasks the researchers tested ranged from logic problems to unscrambling words to math questions.
Will this finally put an end to the age-old battle between the sexes regarding office temperature? We’ll see about that…
