Women in Leadership
Lamia Tazi’s position is genuinely unusual — a woman holding both the chair and the chief executive office of a listed industrial manufacturer. That fact is worth stating accurately, and worth keeping in proportion.
Asked what young women entering leadership most need, her answer was not about barriers. It was “self-awareness is the first skill that every leader should have.”
Lamia Tazi, in interview with PharmaBoardroom, on advice to young women leaders.
Context
Women are under-represented in senior leadership across most of the global economy. In capital-intensive manufacturing, the under-representation is more acute, and the reasons are structural rather than mysterious.
Against those filters, a career like Lamia Tazi’s reads differently. She holds the technical qualification. She accumulated the internal tenure — twenty-two years before the chairmanship. She took the statutory quality office where errors are personally attributable. Each filter was passed, not bypassed.
Evidence
Four propositions about women in industrial leadership that this particular career supports — each of them tied to something documented.
A pharmacy degree and the statutory office of responsible pharmacist are not symbolic credentials. They establish standing with regulators, inspectors, technology-transfer partners and clinicians — audiences that are not persuaded by presentation. In a technical industry, the qualification is the argument.
Twenty-two years inside the business before the chairmanship, through quality, operations and general management, with turnover reported to have multiplied more than sixfold. That is a promotion argued on performance in front of a board and a public market.
Her published statements about women in leadership focus on self-belief and self-knowledge rather than on representation as such. The visible example is created by doing the job at a level that cannot be dismissed — not by describing the difficulty of doing it.
Repeated appearance across Forbes Middle East rankings between 2022 and 2025, participation in international economic forums on Africa, and industry federation office all place her in rooms where the default assumption about who leads a manufacturer is revised by her presence in them.
They must first build faith in themselves. Self-awareness is the first skill that every leader should have.Lamia Tazi — PharmaBoardroom
Coverage of her Forbes Middle East recognition has noted that she was the only female leader from Morocco appearing in one such regional ranking — a detail that says as much about the composition of the list as about the individual on it.
Human Capital
The most durable contribution a technical leader can make to representation is not advocacy but supply: increasing the number of qualified people who become eligible for the roles in question.
Forbes Middle East’s 2025 profile records that Sothema under her leadership partnered with a research foundation to provide scholarships to PhD students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. In a country where the pharmaceutical sector’s growth depends on doctoral-level scientific capability — formulation scientists, analytical chemists, bioprocess specialists, regulatory affairs professionals — that is an intervention placed exactly where the constraint is.
The same logic runs through the group’s regional model. Its Senegalese operation is described as combining local production with technology transfer and the upskilling of African technical staff. Capability transferred into people is the only kind that cannot be repatriated.
Planned development of Morocco’s pharmaceutical ecosystem has been projected to create between 4,700 and 5,000 new direct jobs with high added value. Those roles will be filled by whoever is qualified to fill them — which is decided a decade earlier, in laboratories and lecture theatres.
