By Professor Carol Emslie, Scottish Alcohol Research Network Co-Chair, Glasgow Caledonian University
6-May 2026
This blog post by Prof Carol Emslie reveals how little we know about how policies to reduce alcohol-related harm impact similarly or differently on men and women.
The alcohol industry has women in its sights — and it’s getting more sophisticated by the year.
Where once sexualised images of women were used to sell alcohol to men, brands now court women directly. Taking a leaf from the tobacco industry’s playbook, they align their products with sophistication, empowerment and female friendship. Pink and pretty aesthetics — rosé wine, pink gin, fruity vodkas — sit alongside low-calorie drinks cynically positioned within health and wellness trends. Campaigns hijack Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Christmas to embed alcohol into the rituals of women’s lives. The message is consistent and insidious: drinking together is how women celebrate, relax and connect. It is increasingly difficult to find a birthday card aimed at women that doesn’t feature alcohol (“Wine o’clock”, “Practice wine-fulness on your birthday”).
Digital marketing has sharpened this targeting further. Alcohol corporations have poured investment into social media and digital spaces, which allow them to build brand identities, engage users directly and target specific audiences with precision. We know that greater engagement with digital alcohol marketing is associated with higher consumption and increased binge or hazardous drinking. We also know that this marketing is highly gendered — woven into everyday occasions from fashion shows to festivals, and aligned with social causes in ways designed to resonate with women specifically.
So what effect is all of this having? And crucially, are the policies designed to reduce alcohol harm actually working for women?
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently commissioned us to explore this. We reviewed the evidence on three key population-level policies — restricting alcohol marketing and sponsorship, increasing alcohol pricing or taxes, and reducing alcohol availability — and asked whether they affected men, women and other gender groups differently.
Our answer, frankly, was troubling: we do not know. Very few studies have examined whether these policies work differently across genders. We know even less about how gender intersects with socioeconomic status, age, ethnicity and sexuality when it comes to alcohol policy outcomes.
Our WHO report gives us a clear mandate to say that policymakers must consider how alcohol policies might affect men and women differently if they are to be truly effective. Scotland’s introduction of minimum unit pricing (MUP) has been more closely scrutinised than most alcohol policies, and – unusually researchers did examine its impact by gender. While MUP was associated with a significant reduction in deaths for both men and women, this reduction was larger for men. This is an important finding, and one that demands follow-up. Why might pricing policy affect women and men differently? Are there other policies that would serve women better? We cannot answer these questions without further research. Policymakers should also check whether their policies risk stigmatising one group, or whether they reinforces harmful stereotypes about how men and women should behave.
Alongside the evidence review, we worked with Movendi International to gather global case studies showing what gender-responsive alcohol policy can look like in practice: supporting women in Tanzania to find alternative livelihoods to home-brewing; improving access to alcohol services for women in Pakistan while reducing stigma; and documenting how community organisations in Sri Lanka mobilised when a beer brand attempted to exploit a campaign against gender-based violence for marketing purposes.
The alcohol industry has long understood that women are a market to be targeted. It is time alcohol policy caught up — and started treating women as a distinct group whose needs, vulnerabilities and experiences deserve specific attention.
Acknowledgement: The WHO report referred to in this blog was co-authored by Carol Emslie (Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU)), Antonia Lyons (University of Auckland), Elena Dimova (GCU), Kate Kersey (Victoria University of Wellington) and Annamae Burrows (GCU) with Kerry Waddell (McMaster University) and Juan Tello (WHO)
World Health Organization, 2024. Gender-responsive approaches to the acceptability, availability and affordability of alcohol. Brief 11. World Health Organization. Available here