‘Out of school, now in the group’

In Mexico, the 2000 census showed that 6 million people out of the 63 million aged fifteen or over were regarded as illiterate. The gender illiteracy gap proved then that seven of every 100 men and eleven of every 100 women in the population of fifteen years of age or over were considered illiterate (INEGI 2003a). Moreover, the biggest disparities were in relation to age: whereas 1.5 million people out of those 6 million of illiterate Mexicans were in the sixty-five-year-old and over group, the fifteen-to-nineteenyear-old group included only 300,000 people (ibid.). Gender and age differences mean that it is not rare to find that more women than men of a mature age attend literacy groups run by the National Institute for Adult Education (INEA), since its foundation in 1981.