Are women really more sensitive to cold? Here’s what the science says.

Even as the temperatures outside continue their upward climb, many office workers are stocking up on sweaters and blankets. Overly air-conditioned workplaces mean that many workers—disproportionately women—find that the summer heat has yielded to what some dub “women’s winter.”

Instead of shorts and sandals, the excessive cold indoors means space heaters and fuzzy socks. While the phenomenon has yielded an endless array of amusing TikTok videos, the subject is no joke.

“If people aren’t comfortable, they’re not going to perform as well as they could,” says Thomas Chang, a business economist at the University of Southern California. “It sounds obvious to the point of being stupid, but that’s what we find.”

Work by Chang and others showed that women tend to report being the most comfortable at a warmer temperature than the average man. And it’s not just offices, either. Whether outside or in, at home or work, studies have shown that women are more sensitive to cold.

(The average human body temperature is cooler than you think.)

Some of that, Chang says, may be due to differences in clothing. Having to wear a three-piece suit with necktie will leave a person warmer than if they wore a sundress and sandals. But the other reason is that women, on average, burn fewer calories at rest than men, which creates less internal heat.

But it might not be quite so simple. A study from April 2024 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that a person’s body size and composition was more important than gender in determining when they started to feel chilly. Here’s what science really says about people who are sensitive to cold—and how it might affect their health and productivity.

How your metabolic rate sets your body temperature

Like other warm-blooded animals, humans invest a lot of energy and effort into maintaining their body temperatures at an appropriately toasty level. Plenty of species change their behavior to adapt to thermal extremes, such as becoming nocturnal to cope with desert heat or evolving a thick layer of fur to survive frigid winters.

But just as humans vary in height and body shape, we also vary in our determination of an ideal temperature. Some people are comfortable wearing shorts and sandals even in winter, whereas others of us are invariably cold without a hat and sweater. Our preferences for external temperatures are directly related to how hot our metabolic fire burns.

People with more muscle mass and larger bodies tend to burn more calories at rest than smaller individuals. And while fat is insulating—just ask the seals and polar bears in the Arctic—it can also prevent the heat generated at our cores from reaching the hands and feet.

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As a result, temperature preferences can be somewhat gendered, says Boris Kingma, human thermal performance scientist at the Dutch Institute of Applied Technology. But he cautions that it’s not as simple as “women prefer warmer temperatures.”

For one, he points out the huge overlap in ideal temperatures between men and women. What differences exist are fairly subtle, says Kingma. For another, our preferred temperature varies depending on our activity level and our clothing. To Kingma, the gendering of these variables makes a bigger difference than metabolism.

Data from the recent PNAS study supports these findings. A team of scientists from the National Institutes of Heath found that what mattered most in determining a person’s ideal temperature was the interaction between metabolic rate, body surface area, and body fat percentage.

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“If you have a similar metabolic rate, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man, woman, elderly, whatever. You’ll prefer the same environment,” Kingma says.

How temperature affects your body

Chang’s interest in the relationship between temperature and worker productivity began when he began working in an office that was overly hot. He made as many switches as he could—opting for short sleeves instead of long, iced coffee over hot—but nothing changed the fact that he was often too hot to focus on his work. All Chang could think about in the office were ways to cool down.

This isn’t surprising, says Kingma, since having to generate or dissipate excess body heat is physically stressful. When you get too warm, blood vessels in the extremities dilate to allow the body to release more heat. If that isn’t enough, you start sweating. Meanwhile exposure to the cold makes the blood vessels in your hands and feet contract to prevent heat loss. If body temperature drops too low, shivering can help generate needed heat. Both extremes require extra energy output, Kingma says.

(This is what a cold plunge does to your body.)

While hypothermia and frostbite are examples of excessive cold exposure, conditions like Raynaud’s disease have an impact at less extreme temperatures. Raynaud’s occurs when small blood vessels in the fingers and toes spasm shut, giving the extremities a white or blue tinge. It disproportionately affects women and those living in cold climates and is thought to be an extreme form of cold sensitivity. The condition is reversable upon warming but can be uncomfortable and annoying.

Over time, humans have developed a range of measures to adapt to some of the most extreme climates on the planet. From basic strategies such as fire and animal furs for warmth, to high-tech options like insulating fabrics that can reflect body heat and battery powered warming jackets, these options let humans live almost anywhere.

“The sole reason that humans were able to populate the globe was our ability to adapt to the environment with technology,” Kingma says. And that technology includes more than air conditioning, he points out.

Many of these technologies aren’t meant to keep humans at the “perfect” temperature but rather ensure that they don’t get dangerously hot or cold.

How temperature affects your productivity

Chang wanted to know how much the stress from being too hot or too cold affects productivity. Teaming up with Agne Kajackaite of WZB Berlin Social Science Center in Germany, they tested a group of German university students to determine how their ability to work shifted when they were too hot or too cold.

They found that female students performed better on verbal and math tasks at warmer temperatures, but males did better when it was cooler. The difference was significant, if seemingly subtle—just a few percentage points. It might not sound like much on the surface, but many managers would love to boost worker productivity by such an amount, Chang says.

“All you have to do is make sure your workers are comfortable. It seems like a no-brainer,” he says.

Stefano Schiavon, an architect and environmental engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, isn’t convinced. Schiavon conducted a meta-analysis of studies looking at the relationship between productivity and temperature, compiling data from 35 separate studies, including Chang’s. When he looked at the data collectively, he found that it was only at temperature extremes that output significantly suffered. Someone might be a little hot or a little cold, but that’s not really impacting how well they perform, Schiavon says.

(How to cope with stress at work—and avoid burning out.)

But ultimately the solution to women’s winter seems to be straightforward: just turn down the air conditioning. It’s a cost- and energy-saving move that is increasingly important as the burning of fossil fuels warms the planet, says Schiavon. Adjusting indoor cooling and allowing workers to customize their wardrobe and workspace to enable them to work at their optimum temperature would go a long way to solving both problems, he says.

“We are using a lot of expensive energy to make people miserable,” Schiavon says.