The National Index of Functional Literacy - 2001: examining the differences between men and women

Abstract

This work is part of a group of studies in the educational field that investigate the differences in the results obtained by men and women in educational researches. The National Index of Functional Literacy is composed from a test of 20 questions of varying difficulty that measure how people make use of reading and writing in their daily activities. It was developed by the Paulo Montenegro Institute (IBOPE) and Educative Action (Ação Educativa), and applied to a stratified sample of the Brazilian population comprised of 2000 people (from 15 to 64 years of age). The results indicate that women perform better in every question of the test. Making use of the concept of gender and moving away from the man-woman dichotomy, we have worked with three occupational groups: working men, working women, and housewives. The inferential analysis carried out indicates that the differences in the average rate of right answers between the three occupational groups are significant, after accounting for the five predictive variables (schooling, age, color, Criterion Brazil, and reading habit). This suggests that the differences encountered between the groups are not dependent on the predictive variables. In a question by question analysis, it was observed that in nine of the questions the average performance of working women was superior to both working men and housewives. More surprisingly, in three of the questions housewives achieved significantly better results than working men.