Women Sometimes Drink Whisky Too
Published November 1, 2025 by John Fegan
Whisky has always been treated like a badge of masculinity. The drink of men who believed emotions should be drowned in alcohol and then apologised for the next morning. The assumption was that a glass of it should come with a reminder of the Empire, a hint of pipe smoke, and possibly a moustache. Marketing has historically, up until last tuesday, treated it as the liquid equivalent of a handshake so firm it qualified as a small assault. Women were assumed to prefer things that came with umbrellas and tasted like fruit arguing with sugar. Particularly when the publican was played by Al Murray.
But within the grand, oaken panelled halls of the Whisky Guild, where tradition is stored in barrels and occasionally leaks into the carpet, the numbers have started doing something statistically alarming. They revealed that more than a third of whisky drinkers were women. Naturally this has come as a complete shock to the whisky industry which has built an entire business model on pretending that women didn’t exist. A not unimpressive model given the fairly long history of women owning, producing, blending and generally being present constantly since the late 19th century.
“The industry is getting better at giving women credit for the work they do,” whisky educator and writer Kristiane Westray told the Guardian.
Some women have been here longer than the myths trying to erase them. Margaret Nicol, for example, started blending whisky in 1974 and has only recently been given her rightful place the spotlight. Maureen Robinson worked in whisky for more than 45 years before being inducted into the Whisky Magazine Hall of Fame in 2020; a late recognition for a career that helped shape modern Scotch.
Helping rewrite the story is the OurWhisky Foundation, founded in 2022 by the fantastic Becky Paskin. The non-profit supports women working in whisky internationally, and its editorial arm highlights their achievements. Its mission is simple: acknowledge women in whisky without insisting the bottles be dipped in glitter, launching a “Pink Edition” that tastes exactly the same but costs £12 more, or labelled “for the ladies” like some sort of fermented gender reveal party cocktail.
Even the advertising guild has finally taken note, which is a bit like a tortoise taking up sprinting: unexpected, faintly worrying, and probably signals the end of something important. When pop star Sabrina Carpenter turned up in a Johnnie Walker campaign, a great many traditional whisky drinkers looked as if someone had just suggested putting custard on a bacon sandwich. Young women? Liking whisky? It offended several long-held beliefs, not least that young women were only supposed to pour the drams at whisky shows.
But the figures are undeniable, women make up 36 percent of whisky drinkers. Which is more than double the 15 percent recorded in the 1990s, a figure sufficently small to be mislaid under a bar mat without anyone noticing, when market research was still carried out by men in suits asking other men in suits what they thought women would like.
Fikayo Ifaturoti, a spirits consultant of rare patience, explained it with the air of someone translating for the obstinately confused “I’ve seen women’s engagement deepen, but whisky still feels like ‘the other room’: admired by many, yet seldom invited into their collections.” In other words, the lads have been guarding a door for years only to discover it never actually had a lock.
She also pointed out that whisky marketing suffers from a curious gravitational imbalance. Every Father’s Day, the distilleries churn out special releases as if the entire male population has been surviving on nothing but socks and needs urgent liquid salvation. Mother’s Day, on the other hand, is treated with the kind of silence normally reserved for tax audits and ancient curses. The next great shift, she said, isn’t about inventing a whisky “for women”, which would no doubt arrive in a bottle shaped like a shoe and taste faintly of patronising. It is simply to stop acting as if women in whisky require a ceremonial introduction and a themed gift set before being allowed in.