This paper explores the relationship between household literacy and the labour market outcomes of illiterate household members which Basu, Narayan and Ravallion, 2002, (BNR) report using Household Income and Expenditure data from Bangladesh. BNR attribute a considerable wage premium for women in off-farm employment to intra-household literacy sharing. Such sharing, BNR contend, raises the productivity of proximate-illiterates and the high wage premium shows that females may be more efficient recipients of literacy externalities than men. We argue that any such relationship might not be due to productivity effects but to better networks or bargaining power or to unobserved characteristics of illiterate females married into literate households. We draw attention to the negative selection of illiterate females into non-farm wage employment, which suggests that household literacy is not unambiguously progressive. We also show that it may be that males are more efficient transmitters of these literacy externalities. Using more recent Bangladesh and Indian data we find somewhat different results for household literacy externalities on non-farm wage employment, and that any such effects are conditioned on the social identity of the individuals, their geographic location, and on their sector of employment. We caution against drawing conclusions from one finding using one data set apparently ignoring contrary results, where that finding is congruent with fashionable development views, such as the advantages of females as generators of development.