Men and women are now consuming harmful amounts of alcohol in equal measure.
This significant shift in the drinking landscape has led to calls for better alcohol education to help the younger generation of Australian girls.
Historically men have been more likely to drink alcohol than women and more likely to drink in quantities more likely to harm their health.
Perhaps not so surprising, research - published in medical journal BMJ Open - shows that by the end of the last century men's and women's drinking had converged.
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Some young women are now even drinking more harmful levels of alcohol then men.
Lead author Associate Professor Tim Slade said a very small proportion of the data points found that women were reporting rates of drinking that were in fact higher than men and they generally came from people born after 1981.
Dr Slade from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales said the study clearly highlights the reality that alcohol problems don't just affect men but women too.
He suggested education as a way to engage the youth.
"It is a cause for concern. I think we need to realise that alcohol use is no longer a problem just for men and there are things that we can do about it," he told SBS.
"We need to make sure that our education campaigns appeal to both men and women.
"We need to keep delivering effecting prevention because what we need to think about our next generation, for those whose drinking habits haven’t been entrenched yet and get in there early with the right messages and positive messages, particularly for our young women."
Researchers pulled data from 68 global studies which crossed two time periods, men and women born in the early 1900s and men and women born in the late 1900s.
They looked at the ratio of men's to women's drinking in those time frames and what they found was that the gap between sexes had significantly narrowed over time.
During the early 1900s, men were just over two-times more likely to be alcohol drinkers than women, three times more likely to be problematic drinkers and three-and-a-half times more likely to experience alcohol-related harms, such as injuries and assaults.
But among those men and women born in the late 1900s these ratios decreased to almost one, meaning that by the end of the last century men's and women's drinking had almost reached parity.
"We know that there are broader social, cultural and economic developments for women that have happened in many countries over the past 100 years," Dr Slade said.
"We also know that societal attitudes and norms about drinking, particularly among females has been changing. So all of these contribute to the changing tends that we are seeing."
With AAP
