How many knobs would ornament the London skyline, were their creators not similarly equipped? Above, construction of the 20 Fenchurch Street skyscraper (nicknamed the Walkie-Talkie), in front of the Shard in 2013.
Photograph: Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images
Although Professor Boris Kingma of Maastricht University could hardly be a stronger candidate for Time’s person of the year award, there is a persuasive argument, given the ancient hostilities to which he has put a stop, that a Nobel peace prize would be a more fitting recognition of his achievement. Along with some sort of feminist award, naturally; one expressive of the improvement to their quality of life that many workers should soon enjoy, as employers accept that they have, effectively, been keeping women in the fridge.
It is thanks to Professor Kingma’s research that female unhappiness in the cold, as compared to men’s – something occasionally portrayed as borderline moral degeneracy by domestic bullies of the “well, put another jumper on, it’s like a sauna in here” persuasion – is finally being recognised as reversible. In a study published in Nature Climate Change, Kingma and his colleague, Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt, explain why women have so often felt their surroundings to be punishingly cold. It’s because they were punishingly cold. And yet, as a previous study found, “although females are more critical of their thermal environments, males use thermostats in households more often than females”. Who knew?
In offices, the standard thermostat has been set, Kingma says, since the 1960s, to suit the metabolic rate of “one 70kg, 40-year-old male”. But on the whole, women are comfortable in an environment that is three degrees warmer than the 22C preferred by men. “Thus,” say the authors, “current indoor climate standards may intrinsically misrepresent thermal demand of the female and senior subpopulations.” The main point, it concludes, is “that thermal comfort models need to adjust the current metabolic standard by including the actual values for females”.
Kingma is not, of course, the first person to expose how far our surroundings are attuned, with their default setting, to the preferences of a healthy, fortyish man – for some reason, the image of George Osborne, post-makeover, insistently comes to mind. As well as questioning how many prongs and knobs would ornament the London skyline, were their creators – and all London mayors, to date – not similarly equipped, more enlightened planners and architects have been arguing for years for cities and streets to reflect the existence of people unlike George. Or “the Modulor”, as Le Corbusier called the 6ft male whose heroic dimensions formed the basis of his ideal system.
“We have, so far, lived and suffered and died in a manmade world,” wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman, coiner of the term androcentric, in 1911. In 1980, the US academic Professor Dolores Hayden entitled an essay What would a non-sexist city be like?. And by way of the beginnings of an answer, since 2007 British authorities have, theoretically, been subject to a gender equality duty.
But the Kingma study underlines the difficulties of recalibrating George’s world when it passes for normality. Or, as Perkins Gilman put it, “the order of nature”. If chilly offices and homes are not, for many women, as much an unchanging and possibly divinely ordained feature of the universe as pain in labour, how many other timelessly unpleasant aspects of the status quo might prove amenable to improvement? Arianna Huffington has already argued for a “third revolution”, to change the male-designed working culture of long hours and sacrifice. “It’s a model of success that’s not working for women, and it’s not working for men either.”
Is it possible that – in no particular order – speed limits, street layout, banking regulation, sport, shoes, house design and the entire road and public transport network are likewise due for re-assessment? Can we be sure the criminal justice system, public examinations, airports, gyms, prescriptions for Viagra and pointlessly confrontational broadcast interviews, not forgetting pinkification (as the go-to method for getting women to forget about the above) do not, like 1960s-era air conditioning, unfairly privilege the comfort requirements of a 70kg, 40-year-old male?
Clearly, such a comprehensive review is not that promising without some agreement that George’s preferences should not be society’s factory setting. There might be opposition, for instance, from the awesomely virile design world, where it is still considered professional to produce phones and clunking watches that are too outsized to suit half their potential users, along with comically unmanoeuvrable kitchen appliances, packaging that challenges all but the strongest-fingered patriarch and vacuum cleaners that need their own trained staff (for filter washing) if they are to function reliably.
Culturally, the defiantly androcentric BBC remains content for women licence payers to fund 5 Live, a predominantly sports channel whose audience is more than 70% bloke; secondary schools have been told that many girls are uncomfortable with traditional organised sport; politicians know that women abominate Westminster’s thug-fest. Not everyone, evidently, struggles to understand why, say, the standard working week is still 40 hours, why the City persists with outings to lap-dancing clubs, or, perhaps less pressingly, why shorter-armed citizens are doomed to lifelong humiliation by Mr Modulor-friendly car-park barriers.
Indeed, some campaigners even believe that society has wrongfully departed from its primary purpose, that of placating middle-aged men. In her latest attempt to reverse women’s progress, in a paper called Supply and Desire, the sociologist Catherine Hakim trivialises the risks to women (unless she is simply ignorant of the figures for murder, rape and assault) to argue the case for legalising – and thereby increasing – prostitution. In her Mad Men-based version of gender equality duty, society must accept the existence of a “sex-deficit”, or men wanting sex more often than women; discard the possibility that this is irrelevant; and supply the required market in women.
Where another academic might stress the need for girls and women to enter Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and other professions where they will have a chance of transforming the world, Hakim, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, shares an aperçu from the high-end courtesans: “The puzzle is not why intelligent and attractive women become prostitutes, but rather why more women are not tempted into this lucrative occupation.”
Not for Hakim the possibility, once raised by Perkins Gilman, now being explored in Sweden and elsewhere, that widespread prostitution of women is not, after all, part of the natural order. “At the top end,” she urges our daughters, taking the idea of a male-designed world a lurch further, “these services [ie, the women] become Veblen goods.” That is to say, she thinks prostituted women should be happy to be traded like upscale handbags or watches; coveted by gullible male customers precisely because they are absurdly overpriced.
As dismal as it is to see such a quantity of thinktanker’s energy defending the assumption that men’s reported experience of sex should, as of right, take priority over women’s, Hakim should perhaps, herself, be regarded as a vintage thermostat, one still capable of being reset. Once she reads Kingma she may yet understand: it doesn’t have to be this way.
Is it cold in here or is it just me? Or is it just a man"s world?
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