Publication: Gender Role Attitudes, Perceived
Norms, and the "Double Burden'' in Morocco
Loading...
Date
2024-02-05
ISSN
Published
2024-02-05
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
To what extent do attitudes and perceived norms around household roles hinder the emergence of more gender-equal distributions of labor in Morocco Moroccan women undertake a disproportionate share of unpaid household and care labor and participate in the labor force at low rates. Yet everyday practices are shifting, and normative expectations may be as well. From an online survey of predominantly urban, employed Moroccans, this paper finds that respondents aspire for men to be equal contributors in care tasks. Yet, unpaid labor burdens remain highly unequal, respondents disfavor men taking primary responsibility for cooking or cleaning, and women's share of household labor correlates with perceptions of what men prefer more than with individuals' actual preferences. Results from a conjoint survey experiment measuring preferences around employment and the household division of labor confirm respondents' interest in more egalitarian relations in principle, but also suggest that strong preferences for a male breadwinner family model will continue to drive an unequal distribution of labor at home.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Barnett, Carolyn Louise. 2024. Gender Role Attitudes, Perceived
Norms, and the "Double Burden'' in Morocco. Policy Research Working Paper; 10694. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/41011 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Geopolitics and the World Trading System(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23)Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.Publication Innovative Financial Instruments and Their Role in the Development of Jurisdictional REDD+(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-08)Achieving global net zero carbon emissions requires stopping deforestation and making full use of tropical forests as carbon sinks. Market instruments for the sale and purchase of emission outcomes coming from Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation framework programs could play a very significant role in achieving this goal. The development of these markets has been insufficient so far: their scale as of today is much lower than what would be required to generate meaningful resources for the countries that host tropical forests, and the quality of existing instruments is generally insufficient to allow a scaling up in demand. However, efforts to improve the transparency and integrity of these instruments are accelerating, particularly around jurisdictional Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation framework programs. In parallel with these efforts, innovations in financial instruments suited for the framework’s carbon markets are also taking place, but their scale is limited so far. This paper looks beyond the current state of the framework’s carbon markets to consider a set of innovative financial instruments that would allow completing the infrastructure of emissions trading, enhancing its utility for both issuers and buyers of carbon credits in the framework’s jurisdictional programs. The paper shows how a combination of forest carbon bonds, where countries sell forward (or commit) their emission reduction outcomes, as well as call and put options can be used to de-risk and encourage early investment in jurisdictional Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation framework programs. To quantify the value of these innovations, the paper evaluates the potential scale of these instruments for the case of Brazil. The estimates suggest that the amounts that could be mobilized would represent a critical contribution to effective forest conservation. The proposed instruments and methods can be used by other tropical nations that are prepared to implement a large-scale jurisdictional program. Although the paper acknowledges that the current state of carbon markets would still not allow their deployment in the short term, the conclusion is that these instruments have significant potential, and their future development could be an important contribution to the establishment of successful markets for the conservation of tropical forests.Publication Disentangling the Key Economic Channels through Which Infrastructure Affects Jobs(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-03)This paper takes stock of the literature on infrastructure and jobs published since the early 2000s, using a conceptual framework to identify the key channels through which different types of infrastructure impact jobs. Where relevant, it highlights the different approaches and findings in the cases of energy, digital, and transport infrastructure. Overall, the literature review provides strong evidence of infrastructure’s positive impact on employment, particularly for women. In the case of electricity, this impact arises from freeing time that would otherwise be spent on household tasks. Similarly, digital infrastructure, particularly mobile phone coverage, has demonstrated positive labor market effects, often driven by private sector investments rather than large public expenditures, which are typically required for other large-scale infrastructure projects. The evidence on structural transformation is also positive, with some notable exceptions, such as studies that find no significant impact on structural transformation in rural India in the cases of electricity and roads. Even with better market connections, remote areas may continue to lack economic opportunities, due to the absence of agglomeration economies and complementary inputs such as human capital. Accordingly, reducing transport costs alone may not be sufficient to drive economic transformation in rural areas. The spatial dimension of transformation is particularly relevant for transport, both internationally—by enhancing trade integration—and within countries, where economic development tends to drive firms and jobs toward urban centers, benefitting from economies scale and network effects. Turning to organizational transformation, evidence on skill bias in developing countries is more mixed than in developed countries and may vary considerably by context. Further research, especially on the possible reasons explaining the differences between developed and developing economies, is needed.Publication Economic Consequences of Trade and Global Value Chain Integration(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2025-04-04)This paper introduces a new approach to measuring Global Value Chains (GVC), crucial for informed policy-making. It features a tripartite classification (backward, forward, and two-sided) covering trade and production data. The findings indicate that traditional trade-based GVC metrics significantly underestimate global GVC activity, especially in sectors like services and upstream manufacturing, and overstate risks in early trade liberalization stages. Additionally, conventional backward-forward classifications over-estimate backward linkages. The paper further applies these measures empirically to assess how GVC participation mediates the impact of demand shocks on domestic output, highlighting both the exposure and stabilizing potential of GVC integration. These new measures are comprehensively available on the World Bank’s WITS Platform, providing a key resource for GVC analysis.Publication Labor Market Scarring in a Developing Economy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-08)This paper estimates the magnitude of labor market scarring in a developing economy, a setting that has been understudied by the labor scarring literature dominated by advanced economies. The paper assesses the contributions of “stigma” versus “lost human capital,” which cause earnings losses among displaced workers relative to non-displaced workers. The findings indicate that job separations caused by plant closings result in sizable and long-lasting reductions in earnings, with an average decline of 7.5 percent in hourly wages over a nine-year period. The estimate for one year after a plant closing is larger, at a decline of 10.8 percent. In a common sample, after controlling for unobserved, time-invariant individual characteristics, the impact of a plant closing declines from 11.9 to 8.2 percent. These results imply that stigma in the labor market due to imperfect information about workers (captured by unobservable worker characteristics) accounts for 30.8 percent of the average earnings losses, whereas lost employer-specific human capital explains the remaining 69.2 percent. The paper explores the effects of job separations due to plant closings on other labor market outcomes, including hours worked and informality, and provides estimates across genders and levels of education.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication On Norms and Agency : Conversations about Gender Equality with Women and Men in 20 Countries(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013-04-12)This report provides tremendous insight on gender norms an area that has been resistant to change, and that constrains achievement of gender equality across many diverse cultures. The report synthesizes data collected from more than 4,000 women and men in 97 communities across 20 countries. It is the largest dataset ever collected on the topic of gender and development, providing an unprecedented opportunity to examine potential patterns across communities on social norms and gender roles, pathways of empowerment, and factors that drive acute inequalities. The analysis raises the profile of persistent social norms and their impact on agency, and catalyzes discourse on the many pathways that create opportunities for women and men to negotiate transformative change. The report is underpinned by the fact that arguably the single most important contribution to development is to unleash the full power of half the people on the planet women. It underscores how crucial making investments in learning, supporting innovations that reduce the time costs of women s mobility, and developing a critical mass of women and men pushing the boundaries of entrenched social norms are in enhancing women s agency and capacity to aspire.Publication On Gender and Growth : The Role of Intergenerational Health Externalities and Women’s Occupational Constraints(2010-12-01)This paper studies the growth effects of externalities associated with intergenerational health transmission, health persistence, and women's occupational constraints-- with particular emphasis on the role of access to infrastructure. The first part provides a review of the evidence on these issues. The second and third parts present an overlapping generations model of endogenous growth that captures these interactions, and characterize its properties. The model is then used to perform several gender-based or gender-related experiments -- a reduction in the cost of child rearing, improved wage equality in the market place, and better access to infrastructure. The last part draws together the implications of the analysis for promoting the role of women in growth strategies.Publication Changing Norms about Gender Inequality in Education : Evidence from Bangladesh(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-11)Using a recent household survey for two cohorts of married women, this paper examines norms about gender equality in education for children and adults. Among the main findings are that gender education gap norms have changed: younger generations of women are more positive about female vs. male education, both as pertaining to child and adult education outcomes. Perhaps the strongest result is that Bangladeshi women are more likely to espouse attitudes of gender equality in education for their children and less so about gender equality among spouses. It is also easier to explain norms regarding children's education and more difficult to explain norms about equality in marriages. The authors believe that question on relative education of boys and girls captures the value of education per se, while the question on educational equality in marriage captures the norms regarding marriage and the relative worth of husbands and wives. The effect of education in determining norms is significant though complex, and spans own and spousal education, as well as that of older females in the household. This indicates sharing of education norms effects or externalities arising from spousal education in the production of gender education gap norms within marriage as well as arising from the presence of older educated females in the household. Lastly, the authors also find associations between gender education gap norms and household poverty, information processing and religion, though the evidence here is more mixed.Publication Who Is Deprived? Who Feels Deprived? Labor Deprivation, Youth and Gender in Morocco(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-06)One of the recurrent explanations of the Arab spring is that governments were disconnected from their populations and that public policies were simply not in line with people's sentiments and expectations. This paper provides a methodology to better understand how objective conditions of deprivation are translated into subjective feelings of deprivation using a strand of the recent literature on relative deprivation. The authors apply this methodology to better understand the question of gender and youth deprivation in the context of the Moroccan labor market. They find that the reference group (the people with whom people compare themselves) plays a pivotal role in understanding how feelings of labor deprivation are generated. This can explain the apparent mismatch between objective conditions and subjective feelings of deprivation related to joblessness among young men and women. The methodology can help us understand why greater discontent may be exhibited by a group of individuals who are in fact less deprived in a material sense. It can also potentially help governments design public policies that address objective conditions of deprivation, such as unemployment, with a better understanding of subjective implications.Publication The Role of Men in the Economic and Social Development of Women : Implications for Gender Equality(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-01)This paper is a critical review of the literature on the issue of how male behavior affects female outcomes in the promotion of gender equality. It employs the family as the main unit of analysis because a large part of gender interactions occurs within this institution. This survey first summarizes recent studies on the distribution of power within the family and identifies several factors that have altered the bargaining position of men and women over the last decades. It then reviews empirical work on the contribution of men, as fathers and husbands, to the health and socioeconomic outcomes of women in both developed and developing countries. Finally, it discusses a set of economic policies that have intentionally or unintentionally affected men's attitudes and behaviors. The main implication is that policies meant to achieve gender equality should focus on men rather than exclusively target women.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Kingdom of Morocco : Poverty Update, Volume 1. Main Report(Washington, DC, 2001-03-30)According to the 1998-99 Living Standards Measurement Survey conducted in Moroocco, poverty showed a disturbing increase during the 1990s, regardless of how poverty is measured. This report updates the poverty profile for Morocco following the comprehensive approach suggested by the latest World Development Report (see report no. 20888 for an overview of this report). It presents a detailed analysis of 1) Poverty trends in the 1990s (Chapter 2), 2) which factors are key in explaining the observed increase in poverty (Chapter 3), and 3) the support given to the poor by Government intervention (Chapter 4). An overview of the main initiatives taken by the authorities as well as by nongovernmental organizations and private businesses in the late 1990s is presented in the first chapter; their effects, though not captured by the 1998/99 data, are likely to have a significant impact on poverty reduction in the coming years.Publication Case Study 2 - Andhra Pradesh, India : Participation in Macroeconomic Policy Making and Reform(Washington, DC, 2003-03)For the past six years, the State of Andhra Pradesh in India has been at the vanguard of efforts to modernize the economy and the state while pursuing policies to improve the lives of the poorest. The Chief Minister and head of the ruling Telugu Desam Party (TDP), Mr. Chandra Babu Naidu, is known by some as the "Laptop Minister" for his modernizing initiatives. He has reached out to international organizations and investors but has also maintained his base of support at home, in part through expanded programs in education, health, and rural development. "I have initiated so many things," Naidu said. "They are going on and will pay off after some time. But people need something today." The challenges facing the government are daunting. Andhra Pradesh (AP) is one of the largest and poorest states in India. Its population of almost 80 million approaches that of the Philippines, the 13th most populous country in the world. Even as its high-tech industries develop rapidly, AP's overall literacy rate remains a modest 44% and one-third of the population lives in poverty.Publication Strategic Planning for Poverty Reduction in Vietnam : Progress and Challenges for Meeting the Localized Millennium Development Goals(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-01)This paper discusses the progress that Vietnam has made toward meeting a core set of development goals that the government recently adopted as part of its Comprehensive Poverty Reduction and Growth Strategy (CPRGS). These goals are strongly related to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), but are adapted and expanded to reflect Vietnam's national challenges and the government's ambitious development plans. For each Vietnam Development Goal, the authors describe recent trends in relation to the trajectories implied by the MDGs, outline the intermediate targets identified by the government, and discuss the challenges involved in meeting these. Relative to other countries of similar per capita expenditures, Vietnam has made rapid progress in a number of key areas. Poverty has halved over the 1990s, enrollment rates in primary education have risen to 91 percent (although there is a quality problem), indicators of gender equity have been strengthened, child mortality has been reduced, maternal health has improved, and real progress has been made in combating malaria and other communicable diseases. In contrast, Vietnam scores worse than other comparable countries in the areas of child malnutrition, access to clean water, and combating HIV/AIDS. A number of important crosscutting issues emerge from this analysis that need to be addressed. One such challenge is improving equity, both in terms of ensuring that the benefits of growth are distributed evenly across the population and in terms of access to public services. This will involve addressing the affordability of education and curative health care for poor households. Improvements in public expenditure planning are needed to align resources better to stated desired outcomes and to link nationally-defined targets to subnational planning and budgeting processes. There is also a need to address capacity and data gaps which will be crucial for effective monitoring.Publication Indonesia : Oil and Gas Sector Study(Washington, DC, 2000-06)This study attempts to provide a broad, first cut review of the most pressing issues facing the sector, and to recommend ways to ameliorate or eliminate the problems. The main problems are: 1) petroleum product prices are heavily subsidized at the aggregate level and distorted at relative levels, and thus need to be rationalized within an economic framework; 2) the functions and role of the state oil and gas company (Pertamina) are problematic, and therefore Pertamina must be fundamentally restructured to eliminate the conflicts of interest and inefficiencies; 3) some of the provisions of the production sharing contracts are relatively regressive and need to be re-evaluated with a view to maximize the contribution of the sector to the economy, and to increase upstream investment by the private sector; 4) existing laws and regulations are inadequate and must be replaced; 5) petroleum products are of poor quality and must be improved, particularly by phasing out the lead from gasoline; and 6) energy sector institutions are weak and must be strengthened. Although the issues are complex and sweeping changes are needed, given the current political climate, this is an opportune time for Indonesia to begin the process. As a first step, preparing an official and comprehensive declaration of government policy for the hydrocarbon sector is critically important--needed are the vision for the sector, policy objectives, and policy actions required to solve the sector's problems.Publication Improving Access to Medicines in Developing Countries : Application of New Institutional Economics to the Analysis of Manufacturing and Distribution Issues(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-03)This paper examines alternative frameworks for empirical analysis of supply side activities, namely, the manufacture and distribution of medicine, through the application of New Institutional Economics (NIE) concepts. Attention is focused particularly upon the potential utility of ideas from agency theory, transaction cost analysis and contemporary ideas from strategy theory. The major purpose of this paper is to use these theoretical frameworks to provide insight for policy makers, when faced with specific situations, whether in an international agency, or a private company, or in defining a national strategy. The analysis attempts to show the importance of distinctions between ideas of 'make' or 'buy', between 'national self sufficiency' and 'international purchasing' strategies, the limitations of contractual agreements under market governance and the crucial linkages between strategy formulation, strategy implementation and the necessary capabilities to achieve successful performance in practice. The current international situation on the investment, location and capacity of pharmaceutical manufacturing is reviewed and likely future scenarios suggested. Correspondingly current patterns of trade in medicines and their likely development within the context of the WTO and bilateral trade agreements are discussed. Against this background the promise and the pitfalls for new forms of public-private partnerships, which may offer attractive alternatives to conventional structures are evaluated. The implications of alternative future strategic options for national governments in setting the balance between health and industrial policies are examined and in particular the extent to which a national manufacturing capability should be developed or sustained. Similarly the scope for improving low cost distribution systems for medicines, based upon a mix of public and private sector channels, is assessed. We conclude with suggestions for further development of a transaction-based framework.