Room Temperature is something we are familiar with, and when we are asked to define room temperature, we just say it is the temperature of the room but if that is answer, why is there a fixed value for room temperature being that a person can be a room and feel hot, or cold, but then that thermostat is fixed to 70 degrees Fahrenheit or 21 degree Celsius. Leaving all those things you learned in high school, the reality remains that finding a room temperature is complicated that the figure you were given. It can involve a lot of factors including gender, location, season, and sometimes psychological.
Most of us spend the majority of our lives inside a building a lot as a result of the type of world we find ourselves. After the industrial revolution, we now sit in spaces in a building and builders and architects want to build a house that is conducive for every one no matter the type of person they are. Even when there are cooling devices and many other things to help with the temperature of a room, and no matter what the thermometer says, the temperature doesn't feel the same for everyone.
In theory, finding the right room temperature is simple, as it will have to do with maximizing the number of people feel neither hot nor cold, and minimizing the people who do not feel fine in the space. Studies on this have dealt with comfort temperature rather than room temperature but then, the goal is to make both temperature match themselves.
Although engineers try to do their best with the temperature of the room, there are a lot of factors that determines our perception of temperature, and when this is discussed, gender is usually brought up but then this changes depending on the location as studies in Israel and Pakistan didn't find much difference in the preferred temperature in men and women but in some other regions, gender was a factor.
A study carried out in Tokyo looked at how gender and national origin. There was a survey of a commercial building that housed both Japanese workers and International workers side by side. In the survey, only 26% of people felt the temperature was fine and the difference was between Japanese women who were comfortable feeling about 3.1 degrees Celsius warmer, and Non-Japanese men.
Working a hot office can make a person feel uncomfortable and this would affect their results from the job as well as make them hate them hate the job and this could make people rate their office buildings less conducive. Time of the year can also influence comfort temperature and this often hotter in Summer unlike Winter period. So even if the thermostat is at a particular degree all year round, the temperature would differ for everyone depending on the time of the year. Also humidity can affect the perception of temperature with people rating their indoor room temperature to be higher when humidity is high and this is usually true when the temperature is high.
While there is a standard indoor room temperature, our perception of temperature and our indoor temperature would differ from one another, and it wouldn't be the same at different times of the year. So with room temperature for humans, it is determines by a whole lot of different factors.
READ MORE
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360132310003136
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0378778894900159
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360132308001601
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306456522001711
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1420326X17751594
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378778802000129
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09613210802710298
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363930340_A_Comparison
