Shifting from households to individuals and from the urban-rural divide to the gender divide, we then look at deprivation in terms of employment outcomes. The most relevant claims that are being heard during the Arab spring relate to deprivation of opportunities in terms of work and freedom of expression rather than general levels of household income or expenditure. These claims are individually based rather than household based and when we look at the youth-old divide or the gender divide we are evidently cutting across households. Therefore, looking at individual labor deprivation offers a distinctive advantage in understanding feelings of relative deprivation across the age and gender dimensions. For this purpose we devise a measure of relative labor deprivation following a two-steps model initially suggested by Verme (2010). This method builds on a recent literature that gives more emphasis to the question of the reference group and its role in determining feelings of deprivation. In particular, the methodology allows for integrating a mechanism for the selection of the reference group in measures of relative deprivation. This allows making different hypotheses on how individuals select the reference group and testing how these different hypotheses can lead to different results in the measurement of deprivation.

We find that our measure of relative deprivation can provide very different results depending on whether the reference group is gender specific or not. When we assume that women and men compare themselves with both genders, we find women to be more relatively deprived than men, which is what measures of objective deprivation (such as unemployment or labor force participation) would suggest. If, instead, women and men limit their own reference group to their own gender, we find that men are more relatively deprived than women. This last result conforms to the general observation that women tend to complain less than men about their labor market status despite higher objective deprivation levels and is strongly supported by recent evidence from a qualitative study in Morocco that found both genders arguing that men suffer much more than women from labor deprivation.

Furthermore, we find our measure of relative labor deprivation to be strongly associated with subjective responses in the household and youth survey to questions about social status and emigration. For example, the satisfaction levels reported by youth regarding their opportunities to improve their social status in the future are inversely related to the paper’s estimated levels of relative labor deprivation. These findings underline the importance of the reference group in transforming objective conditions of deprivation into subjective feelings of deprivation, and they are relevant for other countries in the region and call for further research in this area.

The paper is organized as follows. In section two we provide an overview of youth and gender in the Moroccan labor market. In section three, we present the relative deprivation framework that we intend to apply in the paper, while section four describes the data we use. Section five illustrates the results and section six concludes.

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