Reports the New York Times:

It happens every summer: Offices turn on the air-conditioning, and women freeze into Popsicles.

Finally, scientists (two men, for the record) are urging an end to the Great Arctic Office Conspiracy. Their study, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, says that most office buildings set temperatures based on a decades-old formula that uses the metabolic rates of men. The study concludes that buildings should “reduce gender-discriminating bias in thermal comfort” because setting temperatures at slightly warmer levels can help combat global warming.

Twenty-one-year-old Phoebe McPherson of Reston, Virginia has been known to wear "thick leggings, a long-sleeve shirt, a sweatshirt and motorcycle boots" to work, plus a "tartan blanket" and a Snuggie® backwards to "seal off any openings." (BTW, did you know there are swimsuit versions of the Snuggie®? There are.)

One of the researchers points out that "women tend to dress sometimes with cleavage,” and that "The cleavage is closer to the core of the body, so the temperature difference between the air temperature and the body temperature there is higher when it’s cold. I wouldn’t overestimate the effect of cleavage, but it’s there.”

Um... okay.

I don't know about the whole cleavage thing, but I am one of those people who's always cold in the office. (Last Friday, I had to sit in the blazing-hot sun during my lunch break just to feel my ankles again.) I'm all for raising the thermostat by a few degrees to address this gender disparity in warmth and to help the environment, but there's another reason for making offices less chilly.

Although workers who report being too hot or too cold have trouble concentrating, according to a 2006 study, workplace performance increases with temperatures up to between 69.8 degrees and 71.6 degrees Fahrenheit, with the highest productivity at around 71.6 degrees. Chilly workers make more errors and potentially increase a worker’s hourly labor cost by 10 percent. “The results of our study also suggest raising the temperature to a more comfortable thermal zone saves employers about $2 per worker, per hour,” said Cornell professor Alan Hedge.