What are gender roles like in Morocco today?

This is a question I answer carefully, because Morocco genuinely defies a single answer — it is a society visibly in transition, and that is the honest headline. On the same Casablanca street you might see a young woman in a sharp business suit with uncovered hair walking past another in a headscarf, a grandmother in a traditional djellaba and a student in jeans, and none of them is the "real" Morocco at the expense of the others. The country holds traditional and modern gender expectations side by side, and the balance shifts dramatically depending on where you are, who you are with and which generation you are talking to.

The trajectory of change is real and significant. The reform of the Moudawana, the family law code, in 2004 was a landmark — raising the minimum marriage age, expanding women’s rights in marriage and divorce, and reshaping family law in women’s favour, with further reform debated since. Women now make up a large share of university students, and you increasingly find them as doctors, lawyers, engineers, business owners, journalists and government ministers. In the cities especially, women working, driving, studying abroad and living independently is unremarkable and growing.

At the same time, I will not pretend the picture is uniform or that the journey is finished. In more conservative and rural areas, traditional roles remain stronger: men more associated with public and economic life, women with the home and family, and expectations around modesty, marriage and reputation that are taken seriously. Public space can still feel male-dominated in some towns — the classic café full of men is a real phenomenon — and there is honest, ongoing national debate about how far and how fast things should change. It is a society negotiating these questions in real time, not one that has settled them.

For travellers, the practical guidance is simple respect and a little reading of the room. Dress modestly, more so in rural areas and less so in cosmopolitan districts of the big cities and along the resort coast. Female visitors can travel widely and warmly here, and most attention is curiosity or hospitality rather than anything sinister, though some street comments happen as they do in many places. Above all, resist tidy stereotypes in either direction — neither "oppressed" nor "just like home." The truthful, more interesting reality is a country actively rewriting its own gender norms, generation by generation.