Women more literate than men

Male egos take another battering in the war of the sexes. The Southam Literacy Survey shows women are more skilled readers.

To: All men
From: Peter Calamai, Southam News, Ottawa
Re: Latest claims of female superiority

It looks bad this time fellows. They've come out ahead again and it sure doesn't appear to be a fluke: women are more literate than men.

You probably know there are more women than men among Canadian adults—51 per cent to 49 per cent.

Well, the Southam Literacy Survey says it's the reverse among functional illiterates—53.5 per cent are men and 46.5 per cent women.

Don't stop reading. It gets worse.

Women outscored men on 40 of 61 literacy items on the survey AND they spent a minute less on average doing the test. Men did better on 14 items only and the sexes tied on seven.

"The differences aren't large but the pattern is too consistent to dismiss," says Dr. Paul Nesbitt, a psychologist with The Creative Research Group, which oversaw the face to-face survey.

Nesbitt tries to soften the blow to male egos by pointing out that men are slightly better at working with numbers, as opposed to all other kinds of reading.

Big deal.

Here are some other individual items and the correct percentages for each sex.

Had enough? Maybe it helps to know that men also did better reading traffic signs, understanding a newspaper editorial, using the Yellow Pages, deciphering bus and airline schedules and filling out job applications. Of course, an alternate interpretation would be that those were the few things women did worse at.

In the 35- to 44-year-old age group, men almost close the gender gap, with 82 per cent literate compared to 84 per cent of women. But among adults 18 to 24, women are 86 per cent literate while men manage only 80 per cent. Maybe young men have something else on their minds other than taking tests.

Other excuses: females always outperform males on verbal ability tests in schools. The experts say it's NOT differences in intelligence but environments: factors.

School certainly appealed more to the women in the Southam survey. Fifty-seven per cent said they had a Grade 12 degree or better compared to 54 per cent for men. Not surprisingly, women rate getting a high school education more highly than men, 63 per cent saying it's extremely important while only 55 per cent of men do.

And women score their own grade school education higher than men—34 per cent say it was excellent while only 28 per cent of men thought so. Women are also marginally more likely to remember being read to as children and considerably more likely to think reading to children is extremely important, 61 per cent saying so as opposed to 45 per cent for men.

Giving a higher value to education holds up for literacy classes too. Among the few Canadian adults who admit they're been held back by poor reading or writing, women are more likely to say they might take remedial instruction, by 45 per cent to 35 per cent.

Not only do women score as more literate, they also lead more literate lives.

For example, the survey shows women go to public libraries 50 per cent more often than men, write 40 per cent more letters or notes and read more books. Eighty-three per cent of women surveyed said they read or looked at a book over the past six months compared to 73 per cent of men.

What kind of books? For women, cookbooks, books, fiction and religious. For men, manuals, reference and science. Women also reported spending more than six hours each week reading books, an hour-and-a-half more than men.