“Deceptive Advertising Drives Alcohol Use and Disease Among Mexican Women”
La Prensa reports:
“On International Women’s Day, specialists in public health, academics, and civil society organisations warned of the sustained increase in alcohol use among women and the growing scientific evidence documenting deliberate strategies by the alcohol industry to expand its market towards this population group.”
“In Mexico, ENCODAT 2025 found that the proportion of adult women who had used alcohol in their lifetime increased from 67% in 2016 to 75% in 2025, representing around 6.5 million new female consumers of alcohol.”
“Fernanda Ramos, youth representative of the initiative ‘Voces jóvenes por el Derecho a la Salud Mx’, commented: ‘These are not innocent innovation strategies, but deliberate mechanisms to capture new generations, especially women and young people, through attractive products, flavours, eye-catching designs and colours, and discourses of freedom or empowerment.'”
Other Articles on Same Topic
- In the last decade, 6.5 million new female alcohol consumers in Mexico (Vértigo Político)
- Civil society coalition calls for alcohol policies with a gender perspective following ENCODAT 2025 (Infobae)
Assessment
The ENCODAT 2025 data put a number on what advocates for the prevention of alcohol harm among women have been warning about: 6.5 million more Mexican women are now using alcohol compared to less than a decade ago.
This is the result of documented, deliberate commercial strategies by Big Alcohol companies to expand their market by targeting women.
Big Alcohol corporations are deploying a host of tactics and tools to target young women in Mexico: Products engineered with sweet flavours and lower apparent alcohol content; packaging designed with culturally feminine colours; marketing narratives that co-opt the language of empowerment, independence, and self-care; and intensive use of social media influencers to normalise alcohol use among young women.
As the young advocates from “Voces jóvenes por el Derecho a la Salud Mx” put it, these are deliberate mechanisms to exploit women’s social progress for marketing purpose to generate industry profits.
The health consequences are severe and gendered. Women face greater biological susceptibility to alcohol harm, reaching higher blood alcohol concentrations compared to men from equivalent alcohol amounts due to differences in body composition and metabolism. The link between alcohol use and breast cancer is classified as Group 1 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and the WHO Director-General has stated there is no safe level of consumption in relation to cancer risk. With 31,000 new breast cancer cases annually in Mexico, the failure to limit alcohol marketing to women is a direct threat to women’s health and rights.
Movendi International President Kristina Sperkova framed this clearly in one of the articles linked above: where the alcohol industry targets women, harm follows. For alcohol policy advocates, this is an opportunity to broaden the alcohol policy coalition including more women’s health and rights groups, and to advance a gender perspective within Mexico’s alcohol policy framework – as a core element of alcohol advertising bans, labelling requirements, and pro-health taxation that can prevent Big Alcohol from exploiting women’s equality for their private profit maximisation.