What is the Optimal Home Office Temperature?

The great office temperature debate shifts to the home — do employers have an obligation to foot the bill?

Some like it hot and some sweat when the heat is on.

These words, immortalized by The Power Station’s 1985 hit, Some Like It Hot, had some scientific credence.

Women Like it Hot

For years now, the debate has been raging over what the optimal office temperature is, with a 2015 study published in Nature finding that the typical office temperature tends to favor males.

While men and women share an internal body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit), men run hotter than women because they typically have more muscle mass which generates heat by way of extra calorie consumption. As such, males tend to prefer cooler environments — this is true for both sleep and work.

More recently, a study published in PLOS One observed almost 550 German college students and concluded that women performed better than men in warmer temperatures when it comes to math and verbal tasks.

As the charts below clearly demonstrate, men performed better in colder rooms, performance skewing downwards as temperature increased, with the opposite effect holding true for women.