Frigid offices, freezing women, oblivious men: An air-conditioning investigation

[ljm2002]

55. Layering...

...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.