Asri faced significant professional demands requiring work-life balance and strategic management of her responsibilities. The main challenge, she said, was not the workload but proving women’s legitimacy in leadership roles, especially to colleagues with traditional ideas on gender and leadership roles.

“Leadership isn’t something you simply declare; it’s built day by day through competence, consistency, and setting a good example,” she said.

Throughout her career, Asri has supported reforms promoting international labour standards, fundamental rights, social dialogue, and equal opportunities.

She launched the Direction Femmes programme across the Ministry to help women build leadership skills and prepare for senior roles. The initiative contributed to increasing women's representation in leadership positions from under 20 percent to around 35 percent, with many promoted to strategic roles.

For Asri, mentorship programmes work alongside a broader toolkit: legislative frameworks for gender equality and parity, flexible work arrangements and childcare services, targeted economic empowerment initiatives, awareness campaigns against gender stereotypes, visible women role models, and temporary positive discrimination measures to boost representation.

“Many of these women, at the time, didn’t even think about starting an income-generating activity. And when they do start these activities, it’s not just for themselves, but also for their communities. It benefits their households, their husbands, their children, and it also brings about a shift in mindset within the family.”

Asri also pointed out that Morocco has made significant progress in women’s education. When she studied engineering, she said, girls were less than 15 percent of the cohort; now they're over 50 percent. The top 10 national baccalaureate results included 10 girls, and architecture schools are now over 70 percent female. Women in Morocco are breaking barriers in traditionally male-dominated fields such as mining, automotive, and aeronautics.

Women leading domestic work reform in Tanzania

Every day, thousands of women and girls in Tanzania provide essential care and support in homes across the country. Working largely in the informal economy, domestic workers continue to face low pay, long hours, limited social protection, and barriers to reporting abuse and accessing justice.

But progressive steps have been made by the Government to bring transformative changes through revisions to minimum wage regulations and ongoing labour law and policy reforms This signals growing recognition of the need to protect domestic workers’ rights and advance gender-responsive approaches to decent work.

Through strategic partnerships, UN Human Rights has been working with national interlocutors to address the various obstacles to women’s right to work and promoting better representation in decisions-making. In Tanzania, the Office, ILO and Tanzania’s Labour College are supporting domestic workers to exercise their rights. This includes strengthening their agency, participation and peer leadership to amplify the voices of the voiceless in the world of work and enhancing arbitrators and labour officials’ capacity to respond.

“The majority of domestic workers were not ready to be called domestic workers. It was shameful to be called domestic workers, but with continued awareness to them and society, now they can stand and say, ‘I am a domestic worker’ without fear,” said Asteria Mathias, legal officer and project coordinator at the Conservation, Hotels, Domestic and Allied Workers Union (CHODAWU), a Tanzanian trade union representing domestic workers, conservation and hotel workers, and workers from other sectors.

Domestic work, a sector largely driven by women in Tanzania, was long overlooked until awareness efforts brought greater recognition, Mathias noted.

While women remain underrepresented in CHODAWU’s leadership, they are gaining a stronger voice: Mathias is one of five women on the union’s 15-member decision-making body, and all four domestic worker representatives on the Executive Committee and the National Assembly are women.

Since 2011, CHODAWU, the UN and other partners have facilitated a peer learning program that started with 50 domestic workers and has since expanded organically to over 200.

Mathias described this as a strong outcome since, she said, peer learning scales more easily than direct training. An additional 1281women domestic workers have earned vocational certificates from VETA training centres in eight regions in Tanzania.

“The Government of Tanzania has recognised domestic workers for many years. We have a minimum wage, but also a strategy for domestic workers. These are efforts the government started towards the ratification of Convention 189, which is specifically for domestic workers,” Mathias said. “The main challenge, however, has been the failure of society to recognize domestic work as legitimate work and domestic workers.”

She imparted a special message for young women who want to enter the workforce in Tanzania: to work hard and choose a path based on what's genuinely good for their future and families rather than just any available option.

The cost of not having women at the table

Cristina Gallach is the Interim Executive Director of Global Women Leaders Voices, an organization of almost 80 women leaders from around the world.

She began her career as a journalist in Barcelona in the early 1980s, at the end of the dictatorship in Spain and the beginning of its democratic transition.

Gallach recalled a “mobilising moment” where many young people studied journalism because they wanted to continue changing society. As a journalist, she noticed early on that management and executive roles were held almost entirely by men, while women made up the legwork reporting staff.

“As a State Secretary for the Spanish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, together with the Minister for Foreign Affairs, we presented the first feminist foreign policy, which is still in place...,” she said. “This tells me that if you are in leadership position you can change the norms and the environments. That's a very important fact.”

While working at the EU in the foreign policy and security team some 20 years ago, Gallach recalled planning a security mission at a border crossing between Israel, Gaza, and Egypt. No women were included in the planning team and, as a result, no women police officers were deployed to that border crossing.

“When there was a need to check women who wanted to cross, of course they had to be checked by men and that was not acceptable. We immediately identified this as a major failure in our planning, and we had to immediately recruit a few European women police officers to deploy and be part of such an important presence,” she said. “This is a very specific example that women must be at the table, at all levels, in planning and in executing and definitely in such a specific environment.”

Gallach credits strong alliances with other women colleagues and supervisors for helping her advance in her career.

First, during her posting as correspondent in Moscow under a woman chief editor, during what she described as a demanding but formative time as the Soviet Union was collapsing.

Then, under UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon who surrounding himself with women leaders and where she went on to lead the first gender equality strategy at the UN Department of Public Information — covering both staff practices and how the UN's messaging represented gender globally.

“At the EU, I was tasked with implementing the equal opportunities strategy in the General Secretariat of the Council. I was so proud that we were able, in just a few years, to move many women to leadership positions through training processes and specific actions to prepare them to be more self-confident and apply for leadership positions,” she said. “That institution is now very much into equal parity in terms of leadership positions.”

Gallach encourages young women who aspire to careers in diplomacy and public service to be resilient in the face of structural barriers, advocate for safe workplaces free of gender-based violence with real parental leave protections, build supportive networks and seek out good mentors among women leaders; and speak up when facing clear discrimination rather than staying silent. 

“We are in complicated times for equality issues. There has been a backlash on many fronts and only by keeping these basic ideas in mind and supporting each other and speaking up will we be able to confront the backlash and to continue advancing.”