This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

A few years ago, scientists determined that our thermostats are sexist,

namely that office climates had been optimized for a hypothetical room full of 40-year-old

150-pound men, using standards developed more than 50 years ago. And that ends up leaving

a lot of women in the cold.

It's called the Battle of the Thermostat, right?

Tom Chang, a behavioral economist at the USC Marshall School of Business.

He says it goes beyond comfort for women.

It seems that it's not just a matter of comfort but it also

affects their productivity. Chang and his colleague tested that link between

temperature and performance by quizzing 543 German students on basic

addition skills and word scrambles in rooms that varied from 60 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

And if you went from, let's say, the low 60s to the mid-s you saw an increase in female performance of

almost 15 percent, 1-5 not 5-0 which I found remarkably large as much larger than I had

expected.

The effects tapered off after the mid-70s,

but men, on the other hand, had a small decrease in performance,

about 3% as temperatures rose to the mid-70s.

The results are in the journal

Ploss 1. And there's a chance these findings might explain

things like disparities and test scores on the SAT. The long-standing

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