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Join on Telegram As the world celebrated International Women’s Day this week, the Moroccan Observatory of Small and Medium-Size Enterprises (OMTPME) published a census revealing that women represent 16.2% of CEOs in Morocco.
The percentage includes “active private persons, active legal persons, and auto-entrepreneurs,” notes the OMTPME census, which specifically focuses on Moroccan female entrepreneurship. Further breaking down the results of its census, OMTPME noted that 14.6% of legal-person enterprises and 16.3% of private-person enterprises are run by female CEOs, while 25.5% of women are self-employed.
With regard to the meaning of women’s entrepreneurship, the observatory explains that the criteria for legal persons is “a female entrepreneur is a woman who runs a company even if she is not the main shareholder.” As for private persons, a female entrepreneur is considered “the company’s main shareholder.”
According to the observatory, the census database included 567,041 active legal and private person enterprises, in addition to 49,160 active auto-entrepreneurs.
In order to “overcome the obstacle of non-availability of data on gender” in Morocco’s public databases, the observatory adopted a “data-science method” that applies algorithms to predict CEOs’ gender based on their names.
Data used in this census included CEO names obtained from the Moroccan Office of Industrial and Commercial Property (OMPIC), names of private persons from the General Tax Directorate (DGI), and a dictionary of Arabic names composed by the observatory itself using external sources.
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The observatory said it will soon publish a more comprehensive study, with detailed analysis dividing women entrepreneurship by sector of activity, company size, region, and legal status.
OMTPME’s census confirms recent reports that the gender gap remains significantly large in Morocco’s corporate world despite notable efforts to promote gender equality and foster female visibility in decision-making positions.
According to the World Bank, the share of women leaders and entrepreneurs in Morocco was 16.1% in 2019, a rate lower than the world average of 43.2% and the sub-Saharan Africa average of 56%.
Women’s entrepreneurship inclusion remains relatively limited worldwide. To reverse the trend, organizations like the International Labor Organization (ILO) have made efforts to encourage female entrepreneurship by establishing ideal business conditions, providing the necessary tools to improve women’s capacities and help them create successful businesses, as well as offering them moral and financial support to excel in a male-dominated entrepreneurial world.
OMTPME is an assembly of public and private organizations whose main mission is to shed light on Morocco’s productive sectors by providing statistics and indicators intended for public authorities, investors, donors, etc., using data science methods.
The observatory consists of a general assembly, a technical committee, and a board of directors with members from the public and private sectors. Among the organizations are Bank Al-Maghrib, the General Tax Directorate, the Ministry of Industry, the High Commission for Planning (HCP), the National Social Security Fund (CNSS), the Central Guarantee Fund (CCG), the Moroccan Office of Industrial and Commercial Property (OMPIC), Maroc PME, the Professional Association of Moroccan Banks (GPBM), and the General Confederation of Moroccan Enterprises (CGEM).
