Directive guide
Job evaluation: categories of work of equal value
By Mihai Postolache, founder of Egalis ·
In short
1. Why job evaluation comes first
“Equal pay for equal work” is easy; work of equal value is where the Directive has teeth. A nurse and a technician, an accountant and a site supervisor — jobs with different titles can carry equal value, and the law requires you to compare their pay. The classification decides which jobs are compared with which, so it is the foundation of the reported metrics, of workers’ information requests and of the 5% threshold per category.
2. The four objective criteria (Art. 4)
- Skills — qualifications, experience, problem-solving, social and interpersonal skills (often undervalued in female-dominated jobs).
- Effort — mental, psychosocial and physical effort; concentration and emotional demands count as much as lifting.
- Responsibility — for people, resources, information, safety and outcomes.
- Working conditions — physical environment, hazards, schedule constraints, travel.
Each criterion splits into weighted subfactors scored per job. The EU guidelines published by EIGE and the Commission (March 2026) are the voluntary reference; Egalis implements their three routes — graded factor comparison, pairwise comparison and point-factor — with scoring workflows and committee approvals.
3. Gender-neutral weighting — the step everyone gets wrong
Weights can smuggle bias back in
Overweighting physical effort relative to interpersonal skills quietly ranks male-dominated jobs above female-dominated ones of equal value. Weights need a justification and a bias check — Egalis validates weight sets against the EIGE reference weights and flags under-weighted interpersonal factors or over-weighted physical ones before they are adopted.
Score the job, not the person in it: no seniority of the current holder, no performance, no negotiation history. Those belong in individual pay decisions — and there they must be objective and documented too.
4. From scores to categories
Jobs with materially equal total scores form one category. Cutting the score scale into bands by a documented method (Egalis uses natural-breaks clustering with manual review) beats arbitrary thresholds: the boundaries are defensible, and small score differences don’t split jobs that plainly do work of equal value.
5. Governance: committee, approvals, versioning
The criteria are agreed with workers’ representatives where they exist (Art. 4(4)), and the evaluation must survive their scrutiny in reporting and in any joint pay assessment (Art. 9–10) and, in a dispute, a court applying the reversed burden of proof. That means: a committee with workers’ representation, recorded decisions, versioned criteria and weights, and a re-evaluation cycle when jobs change. The Compliance plan covers the full workflow — scoring, approvals, audit trail.
Frequently asked questions
Is a specific methodology mandatory?
The Directive mandates the four objective criteria — skills, effort, responsibility, working conditions — not a named methodology. The EU guidelines on gender-neutral job evaluation, published by EIGE and the Commission in March 2026, describe a step-by-step approach with three routes (graded factor comparison for micro-organisations, pairwise comparison for SMEs, point-factor for larger organisations); they are voluntary. Egalis implements all three routes.
Can we just use our existing org chart or job grades?
Only if they were built on the four objective criteria and are gender-neutral. Grades inherited from salary history or negotiation practice usually encode the very bias the Directive targets — and using them makes the per-category gap and every answer to an information request wrong.
How many categories should we end up with?
There is no prescribed number: enough that jobs inside one category genuinely have equal value, few enough that comparisons stay statistically meaningful. The grouping method (e.g. natural breaks on total scores) matters more than the exact count.
Who has to sign off the evaluation?
The Directive requires objective, gender-neutral criteria, agreed with workers' representatives where they exist (Art. 4(4)). A documented evaluation committee — HR, management, workers' representatives — is the practical way to evidence that agreement.
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