Investigation on the impacts of different genders and ages on satisfaction with thermal environments in office buildings

This paper investigates the effects of occupant gender and age on thermal satisfaction in office environments. The data used for the analyses was collected from 40-sampled occupants and their workstations on 38 floors in 20 office buildings in the U.S. with support from the U.S. General Services Administration. The field measurements include data collection for air temperature, radiant temperature, temperature stratification, relative humidity and air velocity of the sampled workstations. Occupant satisfaction surveys were distributed to each occupant in the workstations measured, and the thermal attributes of building systems were recorded. The objective and subjective data sets support statistical correlation analysis between environmental qualities and user satisfactions. The statistical analysis of air temperatures, occupant thermal satisfaction, age and gender revealed that females are more dissatisfied with their thermal environments than males especially in the summer season with high significance, and occupants over 40 years old are more satisfied than under 40 in the cooling season with marginal significance.