They suggest an office around 75 degrees is ideal for women, while men prefer 70 degrees. But women now constitute half of the work force and usually have slower metabolic rates than men, mostly because they are smaller and have more body fat, which has lower metabolic rates than muscle.

Researchers claimed that climate regulations in offices are based on 1960s models, which only factored in the average man’s metabolic rate.

Any female worker who spends time sitting at a desk can tell you that that makes for a wretched day, especially in the summer when air conditioners are on high, and they have to wear wool clothes and run space heaters even when it’s 90 degrees outside. And two personal factors: clothing and metabolic rate, the amount of energy required by the body to function.

[Frigid offices, freezing women, oblivious men: An air-conditioning investigation].

The researchers called for replacing standard values with actual ones in order to save energy in heating and cooling buildings.

A 2014 study found that the physical sensation of feeling cold is actually contagious, and that merely watching a video of another person experiencing cold caused a physical change in body temperature of the viewer.

Indeed, the study says, the current model “may overestimate resting heat production of women by up to 35 percent”.

“Many men think that women are just nagging”, he said.

As the Times points out, researchers tested 16 women doing seated work in light clothing. The study concludes that buildings should “reduce gender-discriminating bias in thermal comfort” because setting temperatures at slightly warmer levels can help combat global warming.

Ever wondered why women generally feel colder in office buildings than men? Short of resurrecting the two-martini lunch (a nice vodka-shield by 2 o’clock, and Snuggies don’t come with olives) we could refine the formula or experiment with more efficient ways of controlling indoor temperatures.

“If you want to describe the thermal demand of a population, then it should be representative of that population”, Kingma said in an interview.

In a commentary in the journal, Dr Joost van Hoof from Fontys University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, wrote: “These findings could be significant for the next round of revisions of thermal comfort standards – which are on a constant cycle of revision and public review – because of the opportunities to improve the comfort of office workers and the potential for reducing energy consumption”.

However women’s metabolic rates are typically very different from men’s, pointed out the study authors Dr Boris Kingma and Professor Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt, from Maastricht University Medical Centre in the Netherlands.

In most buildings, the temperature is not arbitrarily chosen by the office manager but actually based on a formula known as the Predicted Percentage of Dissatisfied (PPD).