For her PhD at Harvard University in the early 1970s, Wilsnack wrote her graduate dissertation about women and alcohol; her literature review then yielded only seven studies at Harvard’s Widener Library. With her husband, a sociologist, Wilsnack went on to lead the first long-term national study on women’s drinking habits. Among their many findings was the discovery that women who abuse alcohol often have been sexually abused as children, a gender difference that has since been deemed as crucial in helping women with addiction.

Gender-based alcohol research since then has turned up a variety of other sex-specific results.

By the 2000s, brain scans of alcoholics seemed to show that women’s brains are more sensitive to alcohol than men’s. But Marlene Oscar-Berman, an anatomy and neuropsychology professor at Boston University Medical School, has found a twist.

When her team looked at the brains of long-term drinkers, they noticed that alcoholic men had smaller ‘reward centres’ than their male counterparts. This area of the brain, made up of parts of the limbic system and frontal cortex is tied to motivation; it is key for making decisions and even for basic survival. But in alcoholic women, the reward centers were larger than in the non-alcoholic women – implying that their brains were less damaged than their male counterparts.

“That blew us out of the water,” Oscar-Berman says. “Our findings are somewhat counter to the general idea that women have been more susceptible to alcohol damage in the brain than men.” Scientists don’t yet understand what might be causing these differences.