It’s a fact universally accepted and talked about a lot on social media: a woman who works in an office is in need of a sweater.

Office air conditioning is usually set at a temperature that women find cold. One study even said that since women have slower metabolic rates,  the formula used to set temperatures in workplaces may have overestimated women’s body heat production by 3%. The formula was developed long ago based on the comfort of men.

But the rarely asked question is whether temperature affects the productivity of men and women differently.

The Study

Based on research published in the journal PLOS one, researchers found that at colder temperatures, men scored higher than women on verbal and math tests. But at warmer temperatures, women’s scores rose significantly.

The researchers surveyed more than 500 college students to take tests for an hour in rooms with temperatures between 61 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit (16 and 32 degrees Celcius).

The students performed as many simple math problems as possible and rearranged a set of letters into as many words as they could, within a time limit. They were also asked to answer a series of tricky logic problems.

The Result

When they were considered as a group, the temperature had no effect on the scores. But when the researchers split the data between male and female subjects, a clear pattern was seen. Scores on the logic problems did not vary as temperatures changed, but the math and verbal test scores did.

“If temperatures are cold, men are much better than women,” said Agne Kajackaite, a behavioural economics researcher at WZB Berlin Social Science Center in Germany.”

She continued, “But then when the temperature increases, the gender gap disappears” on the math test, and women were better than men on the verbal test. For each increase of 1.8 degrees, women’s math scores increased by 1.76%. That difference might sound small, but it added up.

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“When the temperature was below 70 Fahrenheit, females solved, on average, 8.31 math tasks correctly,” stated Dr. Kajackaite. “And when the temperature was above 80 Fahrenheit, females solved 10.56 tasks. That is, female performance increased by 27%.”

Do the findings mean there is a perfect temperature at which male and female abilities are more or less even? That’s a big leap to take from one study that exposed people to these temperatures for just an hour, said Dr. Kajackaite.

“You don’t have enough time to get annoyed,” she said.

Conclusion

We are in our workplaces for longer hours than that, and the results might be different over the course of several hours or a full day. This is a question for future researches to address.

The researchers did find an impressive detail in the math results. As the temperature raised, women’s scores went up, not just because their percentage improved but because they were ramping up the number of problems they took on. Why might that be?

“Women feel better when it’s warmer, so they can exert more effort,” speculated Dr. Kajackaite. “On a good day, you will try more. On a bad day, you will try less.”

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