>The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average man. But a recent Dutch study

>The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average man. But a recent Dutch study found that the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower than the standard values for men doing the same activity [......] This leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped in blankets in the summer, while their male colleagues wander around in shorts. Who really thinks that people set the thermostat at the office to be in accordance with the formulaic "standard office temperature?" The powerful people in a particular office set it at the temperature comfortable for them. Duh. The oppression of women in this case comes at a much more local level, and if it is true that women prefer a warmer temperature than men (with the caveat of everything falling on a distribution, of course), any change in the thermostat is a zero-sum game where one party wins and the other loses. This means that touching the thermostat will always and forever be a political game. Another strange one the article mentions: the size of bricks. 99% of bricklayers are men. I would be willing to bet that the 1% that are women are unusually large-handed women as well. If we decreased the size of bricks to accomodate small-handed women, the time and cost it takes to build a wall would increase in proportion. It isn't rocket science that the incentives line up with what is good for the majority of people here. As a more general concept, construction materials that are intended to be hand-installed are generally made available in the largest unit that a construction worker can wield. Making these units smaller genuinely decreases productivity. If this has a tendency to select for large, brutish construction workers, I don't see any harm. Especially considering that brutish folks have been getting the shit kicked out of them economically for the last 20 years.