Gender-role attitudes, job competition and alcohol consumption among women and men.

Attempting to account for greater alcohol consumption among women, social scientists have argued that traditional gender roles and gender-role attitudes concerning the division of labor in the family have provided women with a moral or cultural protection against heavier drinking but that the "breakdown" of this protection has allowed for greater alcohol use. This paper assesses the breakdown argument using data from two representative samples: a sample of 12,069 young adults in the United States and a sample of 1,367 employed men and women in metropolitan Detroit. Our analysis indicates that among young women the nontraditional role of employment and nontraditional gender-role attitudes concerning responsibilities for household labor and child care are associated with greater alcohol consumption. However, among the employed, our analysis indicates that it is not nontraditional women and traditional men but rather traditional women and nontraditional men who have greater alcohol use--it is the women and men who believe that they have substantial obligations at home and who have intense competition at the workplace that consume a greater quantity of alcohol.