Directive guide
Job evaluation: categories of work of equal value
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 EIGE step-by-step methodology is the reference implementation; Egalis ships it with scoring workflows, pairwise comparison 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 reference distributions and flags suspicious patterns 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 evaluation must survive scrutiny from workers’ representatives (Art. 4 and 9–10) and, in a dispute, from 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 EIGE step-by-step approach (factors split into weighted subfactors, scored per job) is the reference implementation most national guidance builds on, and the one Egalis ships.
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 every reported metric wrong.
How many categories should we end up with?
Enough that jobs inside one category genuinely have equal value, few enough that comparisons stay statistically meaningful. In practice most organisations land between 5 and 15 categories; 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 the criteria to be objective and gender-neutral and workers' representatives to be able to scrutinise them. A documented evaluation committee — HR, management, workers' representatives — is the practical way to evidence both.