Dr. David Sack - NY Daily News
April 5, 2010
Better-educated women more likely to become problem drinkers than their lesser-educated peers: study
Is a college degree a risk factor for becoming a problem drinker? If
you’re a woman, the answer might be yes. Better educated women are
nearly twice as likely to drink daily, and they also are more likely
than less educated women to say they’ve got an alcohol problem,
according to new research reported in the Daily Telegraph.
The connection
exists for men, too, but it’s not as strong.
Researchers at the London School
of Economics studied thousands of 39-year-olds who’d been born in
1970 in the UK.
“The more educated women are, the
more likely they are to drink alcohol on most days and to report having
problems due to their drinking problems,” says the report, according to
the Daily Telegraph. “The better-educated appear to be the ones who
engage the most in problematic patterns of alcohol consumption.”
The British study found that alcohol consumption patterns in women can
be predicted from how they did on tests as young as age five. Achieving a
“medium” or “high” mark means that the girl will be up to 2.1 times as
likely to consume alcohol on a daily basis as adults.
The
report’s authors, Maria Huerta and Francesca Borgonovi, told the Daily
Telegraph that better educated women may drink more because they have
kids later in life and have more active social lives. They also hold
down jobs in a workplace dominated by men, where drinking is more
accepted.
“At work, they’re around men who are drinking
professionally and in order to become part of the male networking
system, women get more involved in drinking,” says Dr. Margaret Kotz, psychologist at University Hospitals Case
Medical Center in Ohio. “Drinking is much more socially acceptable for
women now than it used to be.”
Women who’ve gone through
college may tend to drink more because they bear the brunt of caring for
kids and households while holding down jobs, says Dr.
David Sack, CEO of Promises Treatment Centers. “Many of our social
support systems have really not caught up with women in the workplace,”
he says. “Also, even in two wage earner households, women continue to
bear a much larger responsibility for childbearing and taking care of
the home, which puts added pressure on them.”
Women who hold a
degree and a high-level job may handle workplace stress by using alcohol
to numb themselves, says Dr.
David Eigen, a psychologist and the author of “Women – the
Goddesses of Wisdom.”
“Better educated women are more likely to
be in a job where the work can be stressful, unfriendly and unfun,”
Eigen says. “And they’re more likely to hold jobs that are never done.
It’s like the difference between flipping burgers in a restaurant and
owning the restaurant. The owner has to buy the hamburger meat and make
sure employees show up for work on time. It can cause a lot more
stress.”
Women aren’t being schooled on the potential hazards of
drinking, Kotz says.
”We aren’t educating our young girls about the
biological differences between how men and women metabolize alcohol
differently,” she says. “And when women have a problem with drinking,
they often don’t seek help because of the stigma. They don’t understand
that it’s an illness and it responds to treatment.”