Sociologists and criminologists have tended to concentrate on both male gang members and their involvement in drug dealing. This preoccupation has tended to overshadow not only the role of female gang members but also the importance of drinking within youth gangs. Despite a growing interest in female drinking, ethnographic and qualitative research on female drinking is still much less developed than that devoted to male drinking. This review was based on data from an ongoing study of street gangs in the San Francisco Bay area, in which 97 female gang members were interviewed using both a quantitative and qualitative interview schedule. The article concludes that, although the sparsity of a literature on female drinking can be partly attributed to a bias in favor of research on male drinking, it may also be partly explained by the relative absence of women drinking in public and the related difficulties of conducting research on the private realm. Within this context, a discussion of drinking by female gang members is instructive because it can include consideration of the extent to which the normative expectations surrounding women's drinking reflect expectations within the wider society. Tables, notes, references