Gender-neutral job evaluation and classification play a key role in preparing for the pay transparency measures contained in the EU Pay Transparency Directive.
The Directive, which will become law across EU member states next year, requires companies to be more transparent around pay as a means of ensuring equal pay for work of equal value.
Gender-neutral criteria is a phrase mentioned throughout the EU Directive, and these criteria need to be used when grouping jobs of equal work and value, when carrying out job evaluation, and to ensure debiased recruitment processes.
For example, the Directive requires that organisations have pay structures based on job evaluation and classification systems that use ‘objective, gender-neutral criteria’. Article 4 states:
“Employers must have pay structures in place ensuring that there are no gender-based pay differences between workers performing the same work or work of equal value that are not justified on the basis of objective, gender-neutral criteria.”
The Directive doesn’t explicitly define what this gender-neutral criteria should be, but it does refer to four categories of objective criteria:
In the past, criteria used within job evaluation methods have been accused of being gender-biased and discriminatory, and they certainly can be if not adjusted to correct this bias.
The issue is that these methods have often failed to address the gender pay gap as they have tended evaluate male and female dominated jobs differently. Until recently, female-dominated jobs were evaluated based on methods designed mainly for male-dominated jobs, which partly accounts for wage discrimination.
For example, job evaluation methods have focused on physical effort and valuing this more highly whilst overlooking mental and emotional effort.
Predominantly female jobs often involve different requirements from those of predominantly male jobs, whether in terms of qualifications, effort, responsibility or working conditions.
For example, a recent ILO (International Labour Office) guide to gender-neutral job evaluation explains a number of examples of physical pressures in female-dominated jobs that are often overlooked:
It is important to be vigilant when selecting the job evaluation method and ensure that its content is equally tailored to both female and male dominated jobs.
Key elements of gender-neutral job evaluation include:
Ensuring the criteria used within job evaluation are gender-neutral is one of the most important methods of achieving pay equality and can help to challenge market-based and gender-biased assumptions that are often built into pay structures.
A recent EPSU paper on gender-neutral job evaluation in the public sector suggests some examples where these principles have been put into practice:
“Good practice examples of agreements on gender-neutral job evaluation and classification exist in several European countries, and some unions have developed and implemented successful gender-neutral job evaluation using objective and analytical criteria. These are typically based on factors and subfactors (skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions) that address all aspects of the value of work carried out in different occupations.
Gender-neutral job evaluation is crucial in ensuring that factors used in job assessments are inclusive of all aspects of work carried out, including factors that address overlooked elements of work carried out predominantly by women. These include overlooked job factors such as acquired learning, emotional/empathy skills, working with people with complex problems, dealing with difficult customers, emotional demands, communication skills, multitasking, lifting or moving people who are frail, restrictive light repetitive movements, exposure to chemicals and corrosive cleaning products etc.”
What this recommendation demonstrates is that the categories of objective criteria discussed in the EPSU paper (skills, effort, responsibility, working conditions) are also a good starting point for ensuring criteria are gender-neutral.
If an organisation incorporates skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions as criteria into their job evaluation approach, then this should meet the requirements of the EU Directive in terms of both objective and gender-neutral criteria.
The EU Directive doesn’t stipulate a specific job evaluation method, but its associated working document does recommend more analytical approaches.
These more analytical methods enable the position of a job to be established in relation to another in a sector or organisation, regardless of gender.
“Methods should be designed so that all positions or groups in an organisation can be assessed using the same job evaluation system, enabling comparisons across disciplines and professional boundaries.
The analytical job evaluation methods, being systematic and complex, have the potential of being less discriminatory than non-analytical methods and they are therefore considered to be most appropriate for job evaluation in a gender equality context. They can thus be used to establish one of the most important components of the equal pay principle, namely ‘work of equal value’.”
The more analytical job evaluation methods, such as the factor comparison or point factor methods, enable job content to be broken down into factors that enable jobs to be compared in a non-discriminatory manner.
As we’ve discussed above, the key is that the selected factors - the criteria for assessing the various dimensions and characteristics of jobs - are not discriminatory.
It’s possible that the EU may take a more prescriptive approach to job evaluation in future.
Article 4 states that: ‘Where appropriate, the Commission may update Union-wide guidelines related to gender-neutral job evaluation and classification systems, in consultation with the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE).’
In advance of any further guidance, organisations need to determine an approach to job evaluation that:
Specifically regarding dimensions or levels for each of the criteria, the recommendation of the Directive is that organisations use or develop a job evaluation or job classification method which has dimensions or levels for each of the criteria that are used.
The steer from the EU in terms of pay transparency is that a structured job evaluation based on objective criteria is recommended. This more analytical method can be less discriminatory due to a more systematic and complex approach.
However many companies are not currently using structured job evaluation methodologies, with many using market pricing as the primary method of assessing the relative value of jobs within their organisation.
Given the requirement to show employees pay levels for jobs of the same value, valuing jobs based on market pricing alone is fraught with challenges.
Organisations with employees in the EU may need to assess whether their approach and adoption of job evaluation is sufficient, robust, and unbiased enough to enable compliance with the new Directive and to mitigate ongoing risk exposure.
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