Women’s access to managerial positions in Morocco

May 27, 2014, Moroccan King Mohammed VI, right, greets Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, prior to their meeting at the royal palace in Casablanca, Morocco. (Photo: AP)

Understanding the structural impediments
Genuine and steady progress is partially constrained by the persistence of important structural impediments

Morocco enjoys currently quite advanced legal framework regarding women rights. Not only the country has ratified the main United Nations conventions related to the protection and the promotion of women rights, but the constitution of 2011 has also established the absolute equality between men and women. Conversely, women’s access to managerial positions remains under 15% with only 3% of female leaders in top management level.

Some facts about women’s leadership in Morocco

Gender diversity in managerial positions ensures the best use of available human resources and improves governance. According to the latest Grant Thornton International Business Report, the “overall median proportion of female executives was 7.1% at successful companies and 3.1% at unsuccessful companies”. This occurs because different systems of representation within organizations provide an added value as women and men have different style of management, and such difference improves the governance of management and decision making process as whole.

Despite this fact, the representation of women in managerial positions in Morocco is rather weak. While women represent 51% of the total population and 38% of the working force in public sector, their presence as managers remain under 15%, with a huge gap between central administration (23%) and decentralized units (under 7%). In addition, the number of female leaders decreases as we climb the ladder of decision making: 93,5% of Moroccan female managers occupy middle management positions, and less than 3% are in the top management level. The transition from middle management to top management remains challenging in Morocco where only few lucky women succeed to break through the glass ceiling.
The Global Gender Gap Report places Morocco in the 98/113 position. This suggests that Moroccan women lag behind not only relative to their working portion but also in absolute terms compared to their peers in other countries of the world like China with 51% managerial positions occupied by women, 30% in Turkey and 28% in South Africa.

Interestingly, history shows that huge progress has been achieved compared to the situation in the 1960s when women used to represent only 1,5% of the working force. Disparities between genders have come under scrutiny in the recent two decades, and important steps have been taken to improve women’s condition in general and in the workplace in particular. In 1997 the Moroccan government was strengthened by the first Ministerial department in charge of women and quota forced the increase of women representativeness in parliament since 2002.

Despite these achievements, the real impediments of genuine and steady progress to ensure better female representativeness in the public sphere are strongly related to the persistence of important structural constraints.

The first impediment: absence of genuine commitment to the adopted legal provisions

The constitution of Morocco establishes the absolute equality between men and women as it stipulates that “Man and woman enjoy in equal rights and freedoms for civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental statements in this title and other provisions of the Constitution, as well as the covenants and conventions duly ratified by the Kingdom” (article 19). Yet, it should be noted that the introduction of absolute equality between men and women in the constitution is quite recent (July 2011) and intervened in the context of Arab spring and under strong pressure of women rights NGOs’.

Furthermore, the article 164 of constitution assigns to the Highest Authority of Parity and the Fight Against all Forms of Discrimination the mission of ensuring parity. Nevertheless, the new elected government, led by Islamic conservative party, delayed its establishment for more than two years.
On the other hand, Morocco adheres to the main United Nations conventions related to the protection and the promotion of women rights, such as the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action which emphasizes clearly women access to decision making positions, the Employment and Occupation Convention against Discrimination of 1958 and its optional protocol, and the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women.

However, it should be noted that Morocco resisted pressure from NGOs and Human rights activists and maintained reserves on the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women until 2012. Actually, the act of removing reserves was motivated by the necessity to ensure harmony with the concept of absolute equality established by the new constitution.

Morocco also repealed the article 726 of the Civil Law, which required the husband’s permission for woman to take up an employment in 1996 and adopted in 2004 the new Family Code, which established equality and co-responsibility between spouses and removed the woman’s obligation to obey her husband. And again, the adoption of the new family code was possible only after the arbitration of the King who made an end to the heated debate between conservatives and modern forces over the reform.
Overall, the context of adoption of all the mentioned legal provisions supports one key idea: The motivation of the adoption of our advanced legal framework was mainly external while a genuine commitment of all the stakeholders is still lacking. This is definitely one of the explanatory factors of the delays in their implementation.

The second impediment: fragmentation of involved institutions and their weak capacity

The promotion of women’s access to managerial position is handled in Morocco by many structures and institutions, and such fragmented architecture constraints the increase of women’s representativeness. The mission of designing the needed policies and strategies to ensure more access of women to decision making is attributed to the Ministry of Solidarity, Women, Family and Social Development which is the coordinating body in this matter. Nevertheless, the Ministries in charge of Civil Servants and General Affairs and Governance are involved too. As for the implementation, it is a shared responsibility of all the public organizations.

The main constraint lies in the difficulty to hold any institution accountable for the progress made in terms of women’s access to managerial positions because none of them is directly in charge of monitoring the progress of this specific policy. Furthermore, the coordinating body deals with many issues such as family and solidarity and has always been in charge of violence against women, vulnerable categories in society and even handicaps in earlier times, and this limits, from the symbolic and functional points of views, the capacity of this Ministry to play a key role in the promotion of an “advanced” version of women rights given its urgent priorities and limited resources.
Overall, the current architecture unnecessarily increases the cost and the burden of coordination between many involved actors and has a weak potential to participate genuinely in the promotion of women’s access to high positions.

The third impediment: persistent ideological divergence over the designed strategies

Due to the rising awareness of women’s role as decision makers in the public arena, the issue of their access to managerial positions has been recently included in the leading gender promotion strategies undertaken by Morocco. Though, the two designed strategies so far were undermined during the conception stage, and their implementation is hindered by the lack of strong support and sufficient resources.

The former liberal Minister in charge of Women initiated the strategy of 2007 for equality which included a fully dedicated pillar to the increase of women’s presence in managerial positions. However, this strategy faced strong opposition from conservative forces and its implementation was hindered due to the lack of comprehensive vision and enough resources for this policy.

Three years after, the persistent ideological divergence over gender equality has delayed the implementation of the 2010-2015 Agenda for Equality prepared by the same Minister. Currently, the newly appointed Minister, who belongs to a conservative Islamic party, decided to review the previous strategy and designed a new one for the period of 2012-2016 with different priorities and less focus on the promotion of women as decision makers.

Written by Badiaa SETTA, Administrator in the Treasury and External Finance Department, Morocco Ministry of Economy and Finance