Work of equal value: how to define job categories for pay transparency
By the Equaudit team · Updated · 3 min read
Every number that matters under the EU Pay Transparency Directive depends on one HR decision: which jobs you consider to be of equal value. The category-level gap, the 5% trigger, the answers you give to employees and your joint pay assessment all follow from how you group roles. This article explains how to approach the exercise.
What equal value means
Two jobs are of equal value when, assessed against objective, gender-neutral criteria, they require comparable contributions even if the work looks different. The directive says the criteria must include skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions, and any other factors relevant to the specific job, and that they must be applied in a way that excludes any discrimination on grounds of sex.
A warehouse supervisor and a customer service team lead can sit in the same category if a fair assessment shows comparable skills, effort, responsibility and conditions. Equal value is about the demands of the job, not its title or the market's traditional view of it.
The four criteria in practice
| Criterion | What to assess | Examples of evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Skills | Qualifications, training and experience the job requires | Required degree or certification, technical and interpersonal skills |
| Effort | Physical, mental and emotional demands | Lifting, concentration, emotionally demanding customer contact |
| Responsibility | Decisions, people, budgets, safety, assets | Team size, budget owned, impact of errors |
| Working conditions | Environment and constraints | Noise, temperature, shift patterns, travel |
Traditionally female-dominated work often scores low on factors that are hard to measure, such as emotional effort and care responsibility. Check that your method gives them proper weight.
A practical method
- Start from what you have. Most companies already have grades, bands or job families. Treat them as a draft, not as the answer.
- Choose criteria and weights, and write them down. Agree them with HR, finance and, where applicable, workers' representatives before looking at who earns what. Doing it afterwards invites the accusation of reverse engineering.
- Score the roles. A simple points system or a structured panel review works. What matters is that the same method is applied to every role.
- Group roles with comparable scores. The groups are your categories of workers. Keep the rules for boundaries explicit.
- Test for bias. Check that the method does not systematically undervalue roles held mainly by women, and review borderline cases.
- Document and date it. Keep the criteria, scores and decisions so that you can show how a role ended up in a category.
How many categories should you create?
Too few and you mask real differences, because averaging unlike jobs can hide a gap. Too many and each category has only a few people, so a single salary decides the result and personal data protection becomes harder. Aim for categories that are large enough for stable averages and distinct enough to reflect real differences in value. A common outcome for a company of a few hundred is between five and fifteen categories.
Expect some categories to contain only one sex. They cannot produce a gap and cannot be compared, which is itself something to explain. Equaudit skips categories with only one sex and marks categories with fewer than three people of a sex as small samples.
Where the categories get used
- In your pay gap report, as the category-level indicator. See how to calculate the gender pay gap.
- To test the 5% rule and prepare any joint pay assessment.
- To answer employee requests for the average pay of colleagues doing the same work or work of equal value. See the right to pay information.
- To set the pay ranges you disclose to applicants. See salary ranges in job ads.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use my existing job grades as categories?
Possibly, if the grades were built on objective, gender-neutral criteria and are applied consistently. Test them against skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions and fix any grade that mixes jobs of clearly different value.
Who should decide the categories?
HR and finance usually lead, but the directive's joint pay assessment involves workers' representatives, so involve them early and keep a record of how the method was agreed.
What if a category has only women or only men?
No gap can be calculated for it. You can still report the composition and, where employees ask for comparisons, you may need to compare with other categories of equal value.