Women Are Now Drinking Almost as Much as Men

We’ve finally reached near gender parity — when it comes to alcohol consumption, at least.

According to a new study, conducted by researchers from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre of the University of New South Wales, Australia, and published Monday in BMJ Open, women are now drinking nearly as much alcohol as men. The study looked at 68 previous international papers about the differences between male and female alcohol consumption from 1891 to 2014 in over four million people during that period.

While the study confirms that men have historically consumed more alcohol than women, the gap begins to close with individuals born after 1976. Women and men born between 1991 and 2000 basically drink the same amount of alcohol. For those born between that time frame, men are only 1.1 times more likely to drink alcohol than women on average, and younger women may even be outdrinking men.

But as women down more liquor, they’re also becoming more susceptible to alcohol-related health issues, and the paper’s authors suggest that public officials do more to address this. The Guardian reports that the cause for the increase in women drinking is due to multiple reasons, including alcohol becoming cheaper and women partaking in “the after-work drinking culture.”

“Alcohol use and alcohol-use disorders have historically been viewed as a male phenomenon,” the study says. “The present study calls this assumption into question and suggests that young women, in particular, should be the target of concerted efforts to reduce the impact of substance use and related harms.”

[The Guardian]