A new study finds that alcoholism is becoming more common in women.

Researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine were worried that previous studies, which asked people of various ages if they had alcohol problems at any point, were not accurate because people may not remember past problems well.

Studies often showed more young people with problems, though they had less time in their lives to develop dependency.

So the researchers compared, for example, results from 30- to 40-year-olds now to what 30- to 40-year-olds said 10 years ago.

"When we did this, we found that the tendency for young people to have higher levels of lifetime alcohol dependence clearly remained for women, although it disappeared for men," said Richard A. Grucza.

"We found that for women born after World War II, there are lower levels of abstaining from alcohol, and higher levels of alcohol dependence, even when looking only at women who drank," said Grucza. "However, we didn’t see any significant tendency for more recently born men to have lower levels of abstention, or higher levels of alcohol dependence."

He added that these results shed more light on a closing gender-gap in alcoholism, showing that it is probably due to higher levels of problems among women, while men have been more or less steady in their levels of dependence.

Another researcher said that may be because in the years since World War II, it has become more socially acceptable for women to drink, so more do.