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Literacy rate among adult women 25pc less than men
RAWALPINDI, Sept 6: The adult female illiteracy rate in the country is
over 25 percentage points higher than that of males, according to a report
released by the International Labour Organization (ILO).
The percentage
points of the overall illiteracy between both male and female are 23.3 per cent
for males and 46.9 per cent for females.
In the adult population, the
this percentage is 35.9 per cent for males and 64.9 per cent for females,
according to the 'Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM),' released by ILO,
the UN labour agency on Wednesday.
The illiteracy rate in adults is
higher than those among the youth, which indicates a positive, suggests the
report.
Recent government statistics tell that the total number of female
students enrolled was around 14 million, compared to 19 million male students.
Among girl, 5.3 million were at the primary, 3.129 million at the middle and
4.02 million at the secondary level.
In recent years, literacy levels in
Pakistan have improved. The overall literacy rate (age over 10 years) was 45 per
cent in 2001 but increased to 54 per cent in 2005-06, indicating a 9.0
percentage point increase in five years, according to an official
survey.
The ILO report says the Asian region saw a substantial reduction
in the number of workers living on less than one dollar a day; the number of
working poor decreased by 148 million between 1996 and 2006, representing a drop
of nearly 50 per cent.
Literacy is defined as "the skills to read and
write a simple sentence about everyday life." Semi-literate's -those who can
read but not write- are sometimes erroneously clubbed together with the
definition of literates as well and counted.
Those persons whose literacy
level is not known are excluded.
Data seem to show that the economically
active population is no longer biased towards highly educated males. On the
contrary, in most countries, a higher proportion of the female labour force has
attained higher education.
But the large share of highly educated women,
in the labour force, is not necessarily a sign of progress in the fight for
equality in the world of work. It only means that better educated women were
more likely to be economically active. Economic empowerment and education often
go hand in hand; women who are restricted in their education opportunities are
likely to be those who are restricted in their choice to work.
Men in the
labour force were also slightly more likely than women to have attained only
primary education, whereas the distribution of persons with secondary education
was fairly equal between both genders. Dawn
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