Are South Asian Women Literate enough?

Literacy rates are rising, but women continue to lag behind. I was curious to find out how women in certain parts of the world are doing compared to their male counterparts. I started to look at data provided by UNESCO on females and males ages 15 and above who can, with understanding, read and write a short, simple statement on their everyday life. 

The data is available separately for the genders for all the countries. I combined them together and extracted only the countries I was interested in so that I could compare and contrast.

Raw data from UNESCO can be downloaded in CSV format. To massage the data and produce the graphs, I used ggplot2, dplyr, reshape2 and gridExtra packages available in R. 

Plots are as shown below. I have used grid.arrange to put multiple plots on a display with ggplot2

grid.arrange(pakistan,SriLanka,india,bangladesh,nepal,madives,ncol=3)

To save the plots I used ggsave

ggsave(file="South_Asia.jpg")

Looking at the data, it is obvious that some countries like India, Pakistan and Nepal need to do more to make their women literate.

Great job by Sri Lanka, Maldives and Bangladesh. Women are almost as literate as men.