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Rabat – Morocco’s High Commission for Planning (HCP) is commemorating International Women’s Day with new statistics zooming into female employment rates in the Moroccan job market.
The new data shows that the proportion of women in the employed urban populations aged 18 to 60 currently stands at 32.2% across Morocco.
This number remains low compared to that of men, who represent 67.8% of Morocco’s urban job market.
“This gap is reflected in a parity index of 2.1 [points],” HCP said, noting that ten out of thirty-one employees are women and twenty-one personnel are men.
Parity in the labor market also varies with age, ranging from 1.8 for the 18-29 age group to 2.4 for the 30-44 age group.
“The under-representation of women among employees reflects their low participation in the active workforce,” HCP said, stressing that the labor force participation rate of women remains significantly lower than that of men.
This rate has continued to decline over the years, dropping from 30.4% in 1999 to 21.5% in 2019.
HCP’s data notably emphasized that long-term unemployment covering a year or over affects unemployed women more than men, with respective proportions of 76.3% and 63.8% due to the contraction of job opportunities.
In terms of human capital endowment, the level of education among employees remains limited, with over 56.7% having no schooling or not having pursued secondary education.
Tellingly, men outnumber women in this category of employees with a whopping proportion of 59.2%.
Read also: Moroccan Women: A Journey of Empowerment and Ongoing Challenges
Employed women with an average of 11 years of education within the 18-29 age group are better endowed in terms of educational capital compared to men in the same age group, who have an average of 9.5 years of education.
Males are also advantaged compared to women when it comes to professional experience duration, HCP said, noting that male employees still dominate the scene although their predominance decreases significantly as the level of education improves.
HCP concluded its study by noting that gender inequality in the face of employment is a “reality deeply rooted in the labor market.”
It added that the sources of these challenges show to “what extent the individual attributes of women determine their position in the labor market, which, in turn, would inevitably fuel wage gaps between the two sexes.”
This latest report comes a month after another HCP report found that unemployment in Morocco reached 13% in 2023, a rate not seen in over two decades.
The data reflected reasons why unemployment is still prevalent in Morocco, including the higher number of joblessness among women.
Last year, another report by the leading Moroccan data agency showed that women made up 73% of the country’s 15 million active populations outside the labor force in 2022
In that report, HCP’s data further indicated that a sweeping 80% of Morocco’s female population of working age was outside the labor market.
