The percentage of women who seek help for alcohol addiction is growing, data shows, while the director of an addiction centre speculates gender equality as the cause.
Gunnar Smári Egilsson, the director of the National Center of Addiction Medicine, told Fréttablaðið that 37% of the residents of the drug and alcohol rehab centre Vogur are women. 30 years ago, it was 20%. This increase marks a trend that is actually moving in the other direction in most other countries in the world.
As for reasons for this, Gunnar speculates that Iceland’s gender equality may be in part to blame – that women have to do everything that men do. Figures from The Directorate of Health show that the more educated a woman is in Iceland, the more likely she is to drink. The opposite trend is the case among men.
Data from The Public Health Institute of Iceland shows that about 95% of Icelanders of legal drinking age do drink alcohol, regardless of gender.
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