Women in Business and Alcohol

A few months ago, London’s Daily Telegraph published a story about a young businesswoman whose regular but not excessive drinking—much of it associated with entertaining clients in her job as a film publicist—apparently led to her death at age 33 from liver disease.

There were likely other factors involved, but her death shed light on the role alcohol plays in a business setting and the fact that more women are starting to drink. One-third of women say they drink regularly, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Another federal study has found that the number of women who self-report abusing alcohol (four drinks in a day) is now at 3.3 percent in the 30 to 44 age group.

Bonnie Rochman of Forbes.com writes that a generation ago, women and work-related drinking wasn't nearly the issue it is today. But as women rise to the top of their professions, they are faced with increasing social commitments that inevitably involve alcohol.

"If you want to make it in the corporate culture with the guys, you've got to do what the guys do," says Genevieve Ames, who has studied alcohol and women as a medical anthropologist at Berkeley, California-based Prevention Research Center, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health. "But you've got to keep it in check. A woman who drinks heavily will be ostracized as less appropriate than a drunk man."

Rochman points out that women also may not realize that biologically, they can’t keep up with men when it comes to drinking. Women's bodies contain a smaller proportion of water, which dilutes alcohol, and they also have lower levels of alcohol-metabolizing enzymes, meaning a woman reaches a higher blood-alcohol concentration quicker than a man weighing and drinking the same amount.

After just two drinks, for example, a 120-pound woman has a blood-alcohol level of .08, which is legally intoxicated. It would take more than three drinks for a 160-pound man to reach that same level.

Women in general are drinking more than in the past, says Stephanie Gamble, an assistant professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center who specializes in treatments for women suffering from alcoholism and depression.

In broad strokes, women tend to use alcohol for emotional reasons, says Gamble, while men tend to drink for relaxation or sociability. Stick a woman in a male arena—a corporate environment, for example—and both gender motives could come into play. A woman might drink not only to ratchet down her stress level but also to fit into the male-dominated social scene.

"I might be more inclined to order a strawberry daiquiri, but if I'm out with a bunch of male colleagues, I'm more likely to order a Manhattan or a scotch," Gamble says.

Women are also more likely than men to become dependent on alcohol—2.5 million women in the U.S. fall into that category—and are prone to suffer because of it. Alcohol-related complications like brain, heart and liver damage progress quicker in women.

There is also evidence that even moderate alcohol consumption is associated with an increase in cancer risk among women, specifically cancers of the breast, liver, rectum and upper aero-digestive tract, and a range of reproductive and sexual dysfunctions.

So is it better for women not to drink, at least in the professional sense? Kim Thompson, a recovering alcoholic who was recently laid off from her job in upper management at a Manhattan ad agency, attributes losing her job to the economy but can’t help but wonder if her abstaining from drinking hindered her career.

Thompson acknowledges the “many negative connotations” of not drinking, explaining that people would ask if she was pregnant and some would call her crazy. Sometimes she would lie and say she was on medication, and other times she would tell the truth.

The good news is that as gender roles change and professional opportunities expand for women, being part of a male-dominated workplace may no longer be as much of a stressor as it once was, says Sharon Wilsnack, a professor of clinical neuroscience at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences and author of Gender and Alcohol.

In the course of a 20-year study she began in 1981 researching the effect on women's drinking while operating in a male-dominated workplace, she found that women earlier in the study tended to drink more heavily and have more alcohol-related problems. Later data showed the effect was not as strong.

There's even better news for multi-tasking women. Research has shown that women with multiple roles (employee, wife and mother, for example) tend to be less prone to alcohol abuse, likely because they have a more expansive support network.

"Even if your life does get overloaded, the meaning and self-esteem most of us get from our work worlds would be a protective factor against abusive alcohol use," says Wilsnack. "Maybe women with multiple roles just don't have time to drink."