Gender-specific issues

Men and women may experience alcohol use and alcohol use disorders differently due to a range of socio-cultural factors, largely stemming from women’s traditional role as caregivers and homemakers. Gender roles therefore influence the ways in which both men and women are exposed to and consume alcohol, develop alcohol use disorders, seek treatment for alcohol-related problems and ultimately how these are treated.  

This chapter aims to provide guidance on the different facets of screening, diagnosing and managing alcohol use for men and women. Specifically, the gender-specific aspects clinicians should consider when screening for alcohol problems or when someone presents with an alcohol problem are considered. In this chapter, ‘gender’ refers to the binary categories of men and women and the body of research includes almost exclusively those people whose gender aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth. Guidelines for transgender, intersex and non-binary gender people is provided in Chapter 17.   

As in many areas of health and medicine, much of the research has focused on men and then generalised to women. There is, however, a body of research which has considered gender-specific aspects of substance use issues, including alcohol use disorder (AUD) for women, but there is far less on the gender-specific aspects for men.