‘Alcohol-related violence’, especially among young people participating in the night-time economy(NTE), has been the subject of intense public and policy debate in Australia. Previous sociologicalwork has highlighted the relationship between men, masculinities and violence, but this relationshiphas received little attention in the research that tends to garner policy attention. In this article,we focus on the treatment of gender in Australian quantitative research on alcohol and violencein the NTE. We identify four ‘gendering practices’ through which such research genders alcoholand violence: de-gendering alcohol and violence through obscuring gender differences; displacingmen and masculinities via a focus on environmental, geographical and temporal factors; renderinggender invisible via methodological considerations; and addressing gender in limited ways. We arguethat these research practices and the policy recommendations that flow from them reproducenormative understandings of alcohol effects and lend support to gendered forms of power.