Science: Woman and Heat

As advertisers well know, women buy far more body deodorants than men do. Yet it is equally well known that, while women merely glow, the same occasions put men in a downright sweat. This damp fact has been experimentally confirmed by Dr. James Daniel Hardy and his co-workers at Manhattan’s Russell Sage Institute of Pathology. Last week they announced their findings—appropriately enough, at a symposium of temperature held by the American Institute of Physics.

Testing normal men and women in a hotbox, the Hardy crew found that the women did not begin to perspire until the temperature of their skins was two degrees higher than “the threshold of sweating” in the men. This holding back is due to a more flexible metabolism in women, which simply slows down their internal heat production in hot weather.

Women have another advantage, according to Dr. Hardy, which enables them to stand cold better than men—”a thicker insulating layer of superficial tissue” (vulgar translation: blubber). This natural protection enables a naked woman to feel no colder in a cool room than a man with a light suit of clothes on.* Result of these superior adaptations both to heat and to cold is that the temperature range of the “comfort zone” is twice as wide for women as for men.

* Female imperviousness to cold has also been attributed, in part, to the fortifying effect of female hormones.