Gender and Body Composition Effects on Heat Stress
topic
Physiological research on heat stress in firefighting demonstrates that female firefighters and firefighters with higher body fat percentage experience greater core temperature elevation at equivalent workloads from differences in surface area to mass ratio, sweat rate, and cardiovascular fitness distribution, requiring consideration of demographic variation in clothing size and physiological performance evaluation beyond the male average test subject demographics historically used in firefighting clothing standards development.
Role
Informs the need for clothing design and sizing that accommodates the full demographic range of the modern firefighting workforce, with physiological performance standards and testing protocols developed using exclusively male test subjects potentially not providing equivalent protection for female firefighters whose different thermoregulatory physiology may result in different relationships between clothing THL and heat stress outcomes that standardised THL-based requirements do not fully account for.