College Women's Gender Identity and Their Drinking Choices

Abstract

Because college women's drinking rates now rival men's rates, the authors interviewed college women to ascertain how gender identity affected their drinking choices. Interpretative phenomenological analysis indicated that high-risk drinkers viewed their gender identity differently than did low-risk drinkers. Counseling implications are discussed.Keywords: gender identity, college women's drinking, interpretative phenomenological analysis Historically, researchers have documented gender differences in drinking patterns, concluding that men drink more than women (e.g., Borsari & Carey, 2006;Lewis & Neighbors, 2004). However, in the past decade, researchers have pointed to a convergence in the high-risk (HR) drinking rates of college men and women (American College Health Association, 2011; Johnston, O'Malley, Bachman, Schulenburg, & Miech, 2014;Piane & Safer, 2008;Wechsler et al., 2002). In fact, in the spring of 2011, a slightly higher percentage of college women than men reported drinking in the past 30 days (American College Health Association, 2011). Researchers have begun to raise concerns about the specific alcohol-related dangers to women, such as health consequences, sexual violence, unplanned sexual activity, and sexually transmitted infections (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 2007;M. A. Smith & Berger, 2010;W. B. Smith & Weisner, 2000), and have noted that women are starting to drink at earlier ages, which is a factor that has been positively correlated with developing alcohol dependence (see Likis-Werle, 2012, for a comprehensive review). Beyond these quantitative investigations, there is little research examining what contributes to these changes in women's drinking rates and, subsequently, how counselors can effectively intervene to change drinking behaviors. Some researchers have speculated that social and environmental factors have accelerated the trends in increased women's drinking. Piane and Safer (2008) PO Box 70701, Johnson City, Ricciardelli, Connor, Williams, and Young (2001) echoed this call, stating that women's drinking is worthy of study "in its own right" (p. 135). Exploring college women's gender identity (GI), or how they think about their biological sex, provides one avenue for responding to these calls. Hoffman, Borders, and Hattie (2000) defined GI as a fluid concept wherein a woman determines how well she fits with her idea of femininity and how much salience gender has for her. GI includes messages from family, peers, and society that a woman internalizes about how her sex should behave. In the post-women's liberation movement, as gender roles have become more egalitarian, the current generation of college women may not be bound by the same GI expectations as previous generations. Indeed, researchers in countries such as the Czech Republic (Kubicka & Csémy, 2008), New Zealand (Lyons & Willott, 2008, Australia (Sheehan & Ridge, 2001), and many others (Rahav, Wilsnack, Bloomfield, Gmel, & Kuntsche, 2006) have acknowledged the parallel between evolving socia...