Women On A Binge

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And the problem is not limited to universities in big cities with lots of dance clubs or schools where Greek life sustains the campus culture. Heavy drinking has also surged at all-women colleges in the past decade, according to a study being published this week in the Journal of American College Health. The research, by Henry Wechsler of the Harvard School of Public Health, shows that between 1993 and 2001, all-women colleges saw a 125% increase in frequent binge drinking, defined as consuming four or more drinks in a row, three or more times in the past two weeks. Wechsler has also found that during those same years, there was a threefold increase in the number of women who reported being drunk on 10 or more occasions in the previous month. Among women who drank, there was a 150% increase in "unplanned" sexual activities, date rape and sexual assault. To be sure, women at single-sex schools still drink less than those on coed campuses, and both populations drink less than men. But, says Wechsler, "by drinking heavily, these women are definitely putting themselves at greater risk."

The new statistics are startling enough on their own, but they come on the heels of a report last month by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University that found that girls as young as ninth-graders were just as likely as boys to report drinking alcohol. Back in 1991, 22.4% of 10th-grade girls and 31.4% of 10th-grade boys reported binge drinking. By 1999 the girls had narrowed the gender gap to within two percentage points of their male classmates.

Science, which has long focused on the effects of alcohol on men and boys, has been playing catch-up as well. Simple observation tells us that women tend to get drunk more quickly than men. Now we're learning precisely why: women's bodies have a higher ratio of fat to water, so alcohol is less diluted when it enters the bloodstream. They also have lower levels of an enzyme that helps break down alcohol. Emerging research shows that liquor also corrodes women's bodies more quickly. As adults, women tend to develop liver disease 10 to 15 years earlier than men, even if women consume only a fraction of the daily alcohol that men do.

Among teenagers, boys who abuse alcohol become rowdy and randy, but studies show girls are more likely to become depressed. They also become susceptible to sexual assault and sexually transmitted diseases. Perhaps most troubling, evidence is mounting that girls who begin drinking in their early teens have a greater chance than boys do of eventually becoming alcoholics. "Girls have a whole constellation of medical problems surrounding alcohol," says Dr. Duncan Clark of the Pittsburgh Adolescent Alcohol Research Center. "We would anticipate that rates of alcohol abuse will ultimately equalize between men and women. That's a perverse kind of equality."