There is a common belief that women generally feel colder than men, but is this really backed up by science?
In fact, the evidence is mixed, in part because few studies addressing this question have been conducted in a carefully controlled manner. That said, the data collected to date suggest that people’s perception and ability to regulate the body the temperature it is not based on their sex, but rather on their physical characteristics – in particular, their body fat and surface area.
many past research seems to support the idea that women often feel colder than men. This has included survey-based studies that investigated people’s favourites thermostat temperatures IN office settings.
Research also suggests that, on average, women have slightly higher core temperatures than men, but theirs hands, feet and ears tend to be colder. This may be related to the two main sex hormones of women: estrogen and progesterone. Estrogen dilates blood vessels in the extremities, allowing the heat to escape; meanwhile, progesterone can constrict blood vessels on the skin, increasing core temperature but limiting blood flow to the extremities.
Connected: Has the average human body temperature always been the same?
This explanation hints at why women might feel colder than men—but then again, there’s likely more to the story.
Some recent, well-designed studies have discovered that the regulation of a person’s body temperature depends less on sex and more on their physical characteristics. For example, in a small study published in the journal PNASscientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found evidence that women and men perceive temperatures in a similar way and do not show any major sex-based bodily differences in how they react to the cold.
“We tried to understand what happens at the temperature at which people start shivering — where they’re cold but not quite shivering,” said the study’s lead author. Robert Brychtaan NIH staff scientist.
In the study, 12 women and 16 men, all fairly thin, each stood in a room as the scientists changed the temperature from hot to cold — roughly 88 degrees Fahrenheit (31 degrees Celsius) to about 63 F (17 C). Participants wore standardized clothing as well as sensors that tracked electrical activity in their muscles and their skin temperature.
A “calorimeter” measured the amount of oxygen people took in and the carbon dioxide they exhaled; this helped the researchers track the amount of energy expended. People’s weight, height, body fat percentage and basal metabolic rate were also recorded, as these factors affect heat production.
Participants also rated their perception of room temperature using a visual sliding scale from “too cold” to “too hot.”
Men’s and women’s temperature perception was the same throughout the experiment, and they also shivered to the same extent in colder temperatures. The coldest temperature they could tolerate before shivering was the same, at about 68 F to 70 F (20 C to 21 C).
The participants’ skin temperatures were similar during the experiment, although, on average, the women had slightly warmer skin than the men. Other physiological measurements – such as the electrical activity of their muscles – were also about the same, but the women’s basal metabolic rate was slightly lower than the men’s.
Women maintained slightly higher body temperatures in cold temperatures than men. This may be because women, on average, had a higher percentage of body fat than men and thus more isolation, the researchers wrote in the paper. The temperature at which women’s bodies began expending energy to stay warm — what the researchers called the lowest critical temperature — was also a touch lower than men’s, by about 1.8 F (1 C), on average.
Taken together, the results suggest that women and men respond to temperature changes similarly. Any differences you may observe from person to person are based on their individual differences in body composition.
“It’s the interaction of body surface area and body fat percentage that contributes to where the lowest critical temperature falls,” not a person’s sex, Brychta told Live Science. “Although we see some differences between men and women, really, it’s like an individualized point.” For example, a taller woman with less body fat is likely to have a warmer lower critical temperature than a shorter man with more body fat.
The study led by Brychta and his colleagues was small in size, but it begins to challenge the notion that women always feel colder than men, in a big way.
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