English Grammar Question

Question

In this sentences:

"In conclusion, literacy rates vary between regions, with males having higher levels than females in most countries."

Why not "have" ? Thanks in advance

Answer 1

In the simplest terms, if you wanted to use "have" instead of "having", you would need to remove the "with" from the sentence. "With" is a preposition in this case and makes it so you must use the gerund "having" rather than the active verb "have". You could rewrite the sentence "In conclusion, literacy rates vary between regions; males have higher levels than females in most countries." but in this case, you are changing the second part of the sentence to an independent clause and need to adjust your punctuation to avoid a comma splice.

The case of "have" versus "having" is something many native English speakers know intuitively without actually understanding the grammatical reasoning behind it but can be tricky to grasp once you start thinking too hard about why we do this.