A second neglected question is whether aging or stages of adult life affect drinking patterns similarly or differently for men and women. The first and more obvious question is whether gender influences on drinking patterns differ consistently in different regions of the world (for example, between well-studied countries of Europe and North America and less-well-studied countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America). In research on consistencies and variations of gender differences in drinking patterns, two important questions have not received adequate attention.
The third approach is one of the major tasks undertaken by the GENACIS project (Gender, Alcohol and Culture: An International Study), which has now produced comparable general-population data on men’s and women’s drinking behavior in more than 40 countries. A third and more challenging way to answer the question is to discover whether patterns of cultural differences may help to explain why gender differences in drinking patterns are larger in some places and smaller in others. Ī second answer to the question of how gender differences vary across settings has been the claim, supported by some evidence, that men and women differ most in the likelihood of engaging in extremely heavy drinking (predominantly male behavior) and differ least in the prevalence of drinking per se.
There is evidence for such convergence in particular time periods, age groups, places, and/or drinking patterns, but there is no evidence that gender differences have been entirely erased anywhere in the world. Wherever in the world research is carried out, the answers to this question are consistently that men are more likely to consume alcohol than women are (e.g., ) male drinkers consume larger quantities of alcohol than female drinkers do (e.g., ) and male drinkers experience more behavioral problems related to their drinking than female drinkers do (e.g., ).Ī more complex question is, how do gender differences in alcohol consumption vary across different settings and drinking patterns? One approach to answering this question has sought to learn whether gender differences in drinking patterns are declining historically, because of increases in women’s drinking related to other changes in women’s roles, or because men may have reduced their drinking more than women have. The simplest question is whether there are consistent differences between how men and women drink.
This research has generally focused on a few basic questions. Research attention to gender differences in alcohol consumption, and attention to the ways that such gender differences both cut across and are influenced by cultural differences, has greatly increased in recent decades (e.g., ), in part through the efforts of the International Research Group on Gender and Alcohol.
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