A look at gender wage discrimination in the Moroccan labor market: a micro-econometric analysis

Abstract

The issue of wage levels (disparity in wage earnings) among individuals lies in differences in the amount of human capital, including education and experience, which is at least as important in the modern economy as physical capital in the form of buildings and machinery. Individuals incorporate very different amounts of human capital. So differences in human capital generate substantial differences in wages. And by an asymmetry of information from job seekers to job providers, which creates wage discrimination between men and women, something that penalizes the labor market in Morocco.

This paper provides an estimate of wage discrimination in the Moroccan labour market based on different decompositions of the gender wage gap, using a sample of 21,368 employees between the ages of 20 and 59 from the Detailed National Employment Survey realized by the Haut-Commissariat au Plan in 2011. It appears that, on average, in Morocco, of the employed population, a man receives 18.3% more than a woman, and that about 33.52% of this gap can be attributed to wage discrimination. This wage discrimination is mainly due to the "female disadvantage" which constitutes 99.98%, although the explained part, i.e. the difference in the characteristics of men and women, is in favour of women with a rate of -15.17%. Then, the discrimination in question explains a proportion of the wage gap between men and women which is greater in rural areas (36.75 %) than in urban areas (24.35%). By sector of activity, the estimated wage gap in the public sector (2.87%) is lower than in the private sector (25.74%) with a higher wage discrimination (28.98%) in the private sector than in the public sector (16.73%).

Keywords : wage discrimination by sex, gender wage gap decompositions, Morocco.

Classification JEL : C01, J71

Paper type : Empirical research.