1 March 2017

Sexist Aircon and Freezing Women: Or, Man-blaming by Intellectual Cuckolds



Karl Kruszelnicki – he of the lurid shirts, gushing vocalisation and honorary doctorate – took time out from his minor celebrity lifestyle to publish on Tuesday 28 February 2017 on ABC RN Online a piece on the gross unfairness of temperature settings in offices shared by women and men workers – It is here:
 A convenient summary follows (with my annotations in bold italics):

Worldwide, sales of air conditioning units go up by about 20 per cent each year. But apart from the cost and energy involved in cooling our buildings, modern air conditioning set-ups all have a fundamental flaw—they are sexist. You see, men love aircon, but women often shiver…

Women usually have both lower height and weight, and a higher percentage of body fat than men. In fact modern researchers reckon women pump out about a third less heat than men do, and so don't need as much cooling. And the solution to that would be…

The second problem is also obvious—women tend to wear lighter clothing, and expose more skin. In an office you don't often see a man's naked knees. Not this, but the opposite…

The third problem is a little more subtle, and it's related to the 'glass ceiling', where women are less likely to get promoted regardless of their qualifications. Boo the patriarchy. Boo? Are we eleven?

And so, the men (oh gawd, which men?) get the more attractive corner offices with lots of glass and great views, while the women are clustered more towards the centre of the building. Karl you may have been distracted by the reflection of your attire, but most office layouts now are open plan with few individual offices; and where they do exist, the offices tend to be located in the interior of buildings. Both men and women typically sit in cubicles. It’s not necessarily like the ABC or Sydney Uni out there, you know…

Now one factor here is that glass leaks heat like crazy, and so in summer, the men in the corner offices want the aircon running colder. That’s because men want to work without being trapped, fully-clothed, in an office sauna, Karl.

Another factor is that the aircon vents are usually closer to the centre of the building. So the women in their lighter clothes are directly in the blast of the cold air squirting out of the vents, on its way to the warmer corner offices. So please, let the women move to the windows and men will take the walls. Bring it on. And take your cardies with you.

Cardigan wars aside, there's a bigger issue with air conditioning—the cost. But the cost could help end the days of sexist aircon. But alas not end your sexist arguments, Karl…

If we just set the thermostat to a slightly higher temperature, we can save energy and money. According to Richard de Dear, a professor of architectural and design science at the University of Sydney, just resetting the thermostat from 22 to 25 degrees Celsius could cut a quarter off the cooling bill.

At that lady-friendly temperature, suitless men can chill out (oh really, chill out at 25 degrees C in trousers, shirtsleeves and enclosed shoes?) and women won't have to battle a cold front while they're fighting the glass ceiling. And men can sweat with no solution other than disrobing, while women feel comfortable – until they witness their male colleagues in Y-fronts, man boobs-a-bouncin’…


Or maybe not. How about instead, Karl, you just arrange for a reversal of the clothing norms – men wear shorts, sandals and tank tops to work and women wear trousers, long-sleeved shirts and enclosed shoes – and then it will be thermally fair and equitable for both sexes based on BMI and surface area to volume ratios. What’s good for the ganders should be good for the geese, right?

And while you’re off doing that, Prof de Dear, rather than glibly insisting we raise the indoor working temperature to 25 degrees C, could get cracking on the design and construction of thermally efficient, well-insulated and ventilated office buildings that deliver temps of a comfortable 22 C in summer and 18 C in winter. In the meantime women can hang on to their work cardies…

What is most galling about Kruszelnicki’s piece is not the fatuous and superficial thoughtlessness, but his emphasis on the shallow sexism of women’s experiences while blithely unconscious of the deeper sexism and bias in assuming that remote architects of any system, being mostly men, clearly act in the interests of all or most men. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The overwhelming majority of men do not want to wear hot clothes in summer, especially in Australia. The people who employ them – a small proportion of men and, increasingly women – along with society in general, deem that Homo officiis don this ridiculous garb to meet an oppressive ‘standard of dress’, and yet happily approve of women at work wearing climate-appropriate clothing of dress or skirt or shorts, sleeveless tops and open shoes. Then Karl and co have the temerity to blame men for the dress codes, while women enjoy the score or more sartorial options available to them.

Fuck off. We need to call this out for the sexist drivel it is. ‘Some men benefit, therefore men benefit’ and ‘all (or most) beneficiaries are men, therefore all (or most) men are beneficiaries’ are really crap arguments; and anyone who can’t see why needs to go do some first year analytic philosophy. Or just Google ‘affirming the consequent’ and ‘the fallacy of composition’ – it’ll be quicker. Even esteemed science journalists and professors of architecture should be able to get it.

These are in reality examples of a deep sexism we can call ‘man-blaming’. Coming from otherwise intelligent and well-educated men, it typifies an irksome gender bias among a certain class of intellectual cuckold. They conflate the gender of the few beneficiaries with their sex entire. It is such an egregious case of slipshod reasoning that one must conclude either that the men arguing the point have a pathological loathing of their own sex, or that they are at best blindly unconcerned about the intellectual merits of the argument in their case.

So, Karl, rather than write self-indulgent articles pandering to your ‘feminist’ credentials, go change the customs of dress and encourage the design of better buildings for all the office slaves to work in.