Are You Drinking Too Much?

By Bonnie Rochman

When it comes to alcohol, it's all too easy to put your health and your career at risk.

Earlier this summer, London's Daily Telegraph published a tragic story about a young businesswoman whose regular but not excessive drinking--much of it related to entertaining professional clients in her job as a film publicist--apparently led to her death at age 33 from liver disease.

Undoubtedly, there were other factors at play. But her "death by misadventure," as reported by the coroner, trained a spotlight on the role alcohol plays in a business setting and how women are choosing to drink.

In Pictures: How To Avoid Having One Too Many

A generation ago, women and work-related drinking wasn't nearly the issue it is today. But as women forge to the tops of their professions, they're increasingly saddled with social commitments and business entertaining that inevitably involves alcohol.

The pitfalls are aplenty, and the double standard is as sharp as ever.

"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, Calif.-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."

Allison O'Kelly, CEO of MomCorps, a staffing company for professional women seeking flexible hours headquartered in Atlanta, Ga., recalls how women who drank too much at the gala, open-bar Christmas parties hosted by her former employer, accounting giant KPMG, wound up as fodder for the office gossip mill. "It was not a good thing for their careers," she says. "Even if men are saying, 'Come on, keep up.' "

They may not realize that biologically, they can handle less alcohol than men. According to one medical expert acquainted with the film publicist's case: "It is very, very easy to drink enough to put yourself at risk, without paying too much attention."

Women's bodies contain a smaller proportion of water, which dilutes alcohol, and 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.

One-third of U.S. women say they drink regularly, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and one federal study has found that the number of women who self-report abusing alcohol (four drinks in a day) is now at 3.3% in the 30 to 44 age group.

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.

Or, if you take Karol McCloskey's advice, you'll order a tonic--with lime, minus the gin or vodka. "No one is the wiser, and I fit in," says McCloskey, 56, of Marietta, Ga., who's worked in human resources, marketing and finance for large companies and small dot-com firms.

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. Notably, other studies suggest that women who drink a daily glass of wine, beer, etc., are less likely to die of heart disease and live longer than those who don't.

So is it really better not to drink, at least in the professional sense? In upper management at a Manhattan ad agency until she was recently laid off, Kim Thompson, 34, and a recovering alcoholic, can't help but wonder whether being a teetotaler has hindered her career.

She attributes losing her job to the economy and not to alcohol, yet she acknowledges what she says are the "many negative connotations" of not drinking. People would ask if she was pregnant; some would call her crazy. Sometimes, she'd lie and explain she was on medication. Other times, she'd tell the truth. Usually, though, she'd simply say it was a personal choice.

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 the multi-taskers among us. 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.

Of course, there's another, even more plausible, explanation: "Maybe," says Wilsnack, "women with multiple roles just don't have time to drink."

In Pictures: How To Avoid Having One Too Many

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