The thread title is inaccurate. Women are now drinking more, but they still have a LONG way to go before they drink as much as men, or anywhere close to it.
The main stat cited as evidence of this convergence was the number of days a month that men and women reported drinking on:
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And women consumed alcohol slightly more days a month — from 6.8 days to 7.3 days on average, while men drank on just slightly fewer days, down from 9.9 days to 9.5 days.
In other words, a decade ago men drank 45% more often than women did, and now they drink 30% more often. So there has been some narrowing of the gap but it certainly hasn't closed.
But that's just frequency. What matters more is the overall amount of alcohol consumed, and men still consume more than twice as much alcohol as women:
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"In the United States, males drink more often and more heavily than females, consuming greater than twice as much alcohol per year (18 liters of pure alcohol for males, 7.8 liters for females)," the NIAAA team wrote in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
Of course men weigh somewhat more than women on average, but even pound for pound, they drink nearly twice as much alcohol as women do. So again, while the gap has narrowed (both because women are drinking a little more and because men are drinking a little less), it's completely wrong to say that "women are now drinking as much as men".
It's yet another example of how when a study is presented, the headline says one thing, while the "fine print" (meaning the actual content of the study) says something very different and usually a lot less dramatic.
