The bar chart illustrates how many percent of people can read and write by region and gender in 2011.
Overall, there is a discrepancy in literacy rate among the given geographical locations. While Central Asia and Central/Eastern Europe have the highest percentage of people who can read and write, the lowest literacy rates are in Sub-Saharan African countries. Also, the percentage of literate males and females are not equal in different places. In many regions such as Central Asia or Central/Eastern Europe, there is a parallel in the literacy ratio between two sexes, in the others, such as South and West Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa) the gap is significantly obvious.
In particular, regions such as Central Asia and Central/Eastern Europe recorded the highest literacy rates, with almost all populations being well educated. Similarly, East Asia/ Pacific marked a very high proportion of who could read and write, although their figure was slightly lower than that of the two aforementioned locations. In these sites, the literacy gap between genders was not crucially significant, with that in East Asia/ Pacific being 3-5%.
Another noticeable detail is that Latin America/Caribbean also demonstrated high literacy rates; nearly 90% of their citizens being able to read and write properly. In contrast,in regions like Arab states, South and West Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, there was a notable gap between males and females. In Arab states, South and West Asia, while male literacy rates were relatively high, female ones were much lower. For example, Sub-Saharan Africa reported the lowest literacy rates overall with around 70% for male and 60% for females. However, the place with the largest literacy gap by gender was South and West Asia, with the difference being approximately 20%.
To sum up, literacy rates varied among regions. Furthermore, the percentage of males being literate was always equal or higher than that of females in all countries.