Is Air-Conditionning Sexist ?

If there is well one question that most of us never asked ourselves is to know if air-conditionning regulations are sexist or not. Well, the article “Energy Consumption in Buildings and Female Thermal Demand” informs us that the regulations that we are still using now have been developped in the 1960s and that its “standard values for one of its primary variables—metabolic rate—are based on an average male, and may overestimate female metabolic rate by up to 35%”.

However, men and women do not have the same metabolism and thus do not react the same to temperatures. Aren’t our actual technologies able to do better and include all the users of one buildings to try to adapt as much as possible to every kind of persons, whatever their gender, or even their weight or their specific metabolism ?

The article can be accessed here