You can spot them. The frozen ones who come outside at lunch like sun-seeking turtles, cardigans balled up next to them, bare shoulders defrosting in the noon sunlight, no matter how wilting it is outdoors.
Every single woman I talked to in downtown Washington on a hot, humid July afternoon was thawing out.
“I. Am. Fuh-reezing. Feel my hand — I’m still cold,” said Ruth Marshall, 64, who was seated on a park bench, face to the sky. And, yes, her hand felt like a cold steak. “I have to come out here for 30 minutes at a time just to warm up,” said Marshall, the director of administration at a construction firm where the air conditioning is set to Arctic.
It’s the time of year desperate women rely on cardigans, pashminas and space heaters to make it through the workweek in their frigid offices. And their male colleagues barely notice.
…Frozen workers make more errors and are less productive, according to Alan Hedge, professor of design and environmental analysis and director of Cornell’s Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory, who studied office temperatures about a decade ago.
Researchers had their hands on the controls at an insurance office for a month. And when they warmed the place from 68 to 77 degrees, typos went down by 44 percent and productivity went up by 150 percent.
Things Uncle John Sends 