People tend to think of beer chugging frat guys as the biggest consumers of alcohol on campus but a new study suggests otherwise.

The New York Daily News reports.

College women outdrinking men: study

American women are outdrinking men across college campuses.

When it comes to what’s deemed safe alcohol limits, college women are outdrinking the men, according to a study.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) reports that women should adhere to a seven-drink weekly limit, but more than 65 percent of freshman women in the US surpassed that, the researchers said. In comparison, 60 percent of men exceeded their recommended limit of 14 drinks weekly.

Plus the average woman drank more than the recommended amount in 15 percent of the weeks during the academic year. Men surpassed their limit 12 percent of the weeks in the school year.

Women also reported no signs of slowing down over the course of the school year, whereas the men became less and less likely to exceed those limits as the year wore on.

To reach their findings, the researchers recruited 992 (575 females, 417 males) incoming freshman at three universities in the US, with students filling out biweekly email surveys about their recent drinking habits throughout the school year.

“Recommended drinking limits are lower for women than for men because research to date has found that women experience alcohol-related problems at lower levels of alcohol consumption than men,” said corresponding author Bettina B. Hoeppner of the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Addiction Medicine, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School.

“It is always important to take gender into account when studying health or risk behaviors,” added Melissa A. Lewis, associate professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington.