London: Well-educated young women are more likely to binge drink, says a new study from the UK’s Institute of Child Health.

It also found that women who have children early and have fewer qualifications tend to take up drinking heavily in their 40s.

They concluded that the difference in drinking habits was down to having children. Older women without qualifications were twice as likely to binge drink – that it consume ten or more units of alcohol at any one time – than their better educated counterparts.

The habits of 11,500 British men and women born during one week in March 1958 were monitored on how much they drank. They were monitored and surveyed about how much and how often they drank at the ages of 23, 33 and 42.