A Step-by-Step Guide for Gender-Neutral Job Evaluation, For Those Doing It In-House
The European Union’s Pay Transparency Directive has set out a whole new regime for job evaluation, in an effort to make it more gender neutral. It requires the demands of a role to be documented, which include the skills, responsibility, effort and working conditions of the role itself, not the person doing it. This guide sets out the practical steps to run one.
The approach below is based on the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) and European Commission’s EU wide guidelines on gender neutral job evaluation and classification, Step by step toolkit, published in 2026. The toolkit is designed for organisations of all sizes, with different approaches depending on the number and diversity of roles.
If you already use Mercer, Hay or another established job evaluation framework, see the FAQ at the end of this guide, "What if we already use Hay, Mercer or another established methodology?"
Step 1: Form a committee and brief stakeholders
Documenting jobs under these new guidelines is not a side of the desk scramble. It requires a project team and touches almost every single person in the business, so proper communication will need to be factored in throughout.
The EIGE toolkit starts by bringing together the people who will lead and participate in the job evaluation process.
Action: Name a working group of two to five people. This would typically include:
HR lead or project owner: Owns the process, timeline and documentation
A senior sponsor: Gives the process authority, unblocks resourcing
Representatives from each major department: Know what roles actually involve
Someone with compensation/finance literacy: Needed once scores become pay grades
Trade union or works council rep, if applicable: Involve worker representatives where required
Someone with DEI knowledge, preferably: Anchors the gender bias work
Aim for gender balance and a mix of levels in the committee, not just management.
Brief leadership and stakeholders separately, before the full launch: jobs in scope, timeline, resourcing needed.
If a collective agreement covers pay or job evaluation, check its consultation provisions now and notify worker representatives before the committee starts.
Why this matters: A single evaluator brings one set of assumptions to every scoring decision. A committee cross checks those assumptions before they turn into pay outcomes. Broad representation helps protect against bias at the evaluation stage.
Output: A named committee with defined roles, and a senior stakeholder group that has agreed the scope and resourcing.
Step 2: Prepare the committee to recognise bias
Action: Run a short session covering:
Personal reflection: What comes to mind as "demanding work"? Which roles do you instinctively rate high or low, and why?
Association check: What image comes to mind for "engineer", "nurse", "cleaner", "manager"? Notice assumed gender, skill level or traits.
Language check: Phrases like "strong leadership" or "natural multitasker" can frame learned skills as innate traits. Practice rewriting them as neutral, skills based language.
Agree as a group on demands that tend to get missed: emotional effort, coordination, non verbal communication, psychosocial, not just physical, risk.
The EIGE toolkit specifically highlights the importance of recognising skills, responsibility and effort that can be overlooked or undervalued in jobs commonly performed by women, including psychosocial and emotional effort, planning and organisational skills, and physical dexterity.
Why this matters: Soft skills more common in roles typically done by women, such as communication, emotional labour and coordination, can be undervalued when they are treated as personality traits rather than professional skills. Naming this before evaluation starts helps stop it recurring.
Output: A committee with a shared list of demands it has agreed not to overlook.
Step 3: Write the project outline
Action: Set out, briefly:
Goals: Compliance, closing a known pay gap, building trust, or all three.
Scope: Whole organisation, specific departments, or one role.
Timeframe, scaled to the number of jobs.
Resources: Budget, HR time, tools.
Approach: Which EIGE pathway and evaluation method will be used.
The EIGE toolkit provides different approaches for micro organisations, small and medium sized organisations, and larger organisations with more varied jobs. The standard approach uses analytical point factor evaluation, while smaller organisations may use simplified approaches such as pair comparison.
Why this matters: Without a documented scope and rationale, it is hard to show later that the exercise was applied consistently and for a legitimate reason. Good documentation also creates an audit trail for how decisions were made.
Output: A short outline signed off by the committee and leadership before communications go out.
Step 4: Communicate the activity to the organisation
Action: Send a launch communication covering purpose, approach and timeline. State clearly:
Jobs are being evaluated, not people.
The evaluation is about the requirements of the role, not individual performance.
No one's pay will go down as a direct result of participating in the evaluation.
Updates will follow.
Use multiple channels so everyone's reached, and set up a way to raise questions or concerns.
Why this matters: Workers left in the dark assume they are personally being judged. That drives resistance and makes people less candid in the information gathering that follows.
Output: A dated record of what was communicated, and an open channel for questions.
Step 5: Build shared understanding
Action:
Walk the committee through how the evaluation works in principle, including the four factors: skills, responsibility, effort and working conditions.
Explain the chosen evaluation method and how scoring will work.
Give the wider workforce a short briefing on why the process matters, folded into existing training or a company event.
The EIGE toolkit stresses that the committee should understand the evaluation method, the factor and subfactor plan, and the scoring levels before evaluation begins.
Why this matters: Evaluators who understand the reasoning apply it more consistently. Inconsistent application between evaluators is one of the ways bias re enters the process.
Output: A committee aligned on approach, and a workforce that has heard the rationale.
Step 6: Build the evaluation framework and scoring matrix
The scoring framework should be agreed in advance so that you know what evidence you need to collect and every job is ultimately assessed against the same criteria. Otherwise there is a risk of unconsciously designing the framework around the jobs you already know.
Action:
Start with the four core factors: skills, responsibility, effort and working conditions.
Review the relevant subfactors under each, such as knowledge, interpersonal and communication skills, problem solving, planning and organisational skills, physical skills, responsibility for people and resources, mental and emotional effort, and working conditions.
Agree the levels for each subfactor and what each level means.
Agree the point values and weightings.
Decide whether the standard EIGE factor and subfactor plan is sufficient or whether an additional subfactor is genuinely needed.
If adding one, define it clearly, make sure it is objective and gender neutral, and document why it is necessary.
Agree the scoring rules before individual jobs are evaluated.
For the standard point factor approach, EIGE provides default weights of 40% for skills, 35% for responsibility, 15% for effort and 10% for working conditions. These can be adapted to the organisation's context, but the rationale should be documented..
Why this matters: A predefined scoring framework makes the evaluation comparable. It also tells you what information to collect. You are not asking workers to describe everything they do and then deciding afterwards what matters. You are collecting evidence about the demands that the agreed framework says matter.
Output: An agreed scoring matrix, with factors, subfactors, levels, definitions, points and weightings, ready to use for every job.
Step 7: Assign departments to gather job content information
Now use the framework to collect the evidence needed to evaluate each job.
Action, in three parts:
Pull existing documentation. Assign committee members or HR contacts to departments. Gather job descriptions or adverts, employment type, department and reporting line.
Collect insight from workers. Send a structured questionnaire covering the skills, responsibilities, effort and working conditions identified in the evaluation framework, followed by targeted interviews where needed to clarify gaps. Keep both focused on the job, not the person.
Build a profile per job. Combine documentation and worker input: title, department, purpose in a sentence or two, and a summary of the requirements under each relevant factor and subfactor. Share the draft back with the worker or their representative to validate.
The EIGE toolkit provides a worker questionnaire, interview guide and job profile template specifically for this stage.
Collect only what is needed, get consent where required, anonymise where possible, and restrict access to the committee and HR.
Why this matters: Existing job descriptions reflect a role's history more than what it involves today, and formal documentation can miss tasks workers themselves treat as routine. The job profile turns those different sources into a consistent evidence base for evaluation.
Output: A validated job content profile for every role in scope.
Step 8: Score each job against the matrix
Now the evidence collected in the job profile is used to score the job.
Action: Each committee member scores each job against the predefined subfactors, assigning the level that best describes the demands of the role. Record the evidence supporting the score and, where useful, a short written justification.
Do this individually first, before bringing the committee together.
Watch for two things:
Do not let current pay or the job holder's performance influence the rating.
Watch for the "halo effect", where a job scoring well early gets scored generously throughout by momentum, or the reverse.
Do not chase a target total. Score each subfactor on its own merits.
This is where the scoring matrix becomes important: the evaluator is not deciding whether a job "feels senior" or "feels difficult". They are matching the evidence in the job profile to a predefined level.
Why this matters: Scoring against the same predefined criteria, rather than an evaluator's overall impression, is what makes results comparable and defensible.
Output: A completed individual scoring table, with evidence and scores, for every job.
Step 9: Bring the group together to standardise scoring
Action: Convene the committee to agree one level per subfactor, per job.
A chair collects everyone's levels without names attached and shares the spread, for example: "For knowledge, two scored level 3 and three scored level 4."
Where everyone agrees, that level stands. Where scores diverge, discuss the reasoning against the job profile and subfactor definitions, not opinion, until you reach a shared, evidence based level.
Watch for groupthink, with people deferring to the first or loudest opinion. Consider appointing someone to challenge early consensus.
Periodically compare earlier evaluated jobs against later ones to catch drift in how consistently criteria are being applied.
Check women dominated roles specifically: was emotional effort, coordination or psychosocial working conditions scored consistently with equivalent demands in men dominated roles?
Record the agreed rationale, especially where there was real disagreement.
Why this matters: Even trained evaluators can unconsciously score similar demands differently depending on whether a role is typically done by men or women. Group standardisation catches that before it becomes embedded in the classification or pay structure.
Output: A single, agreed scoring table with rationale, and a total score for every role.
Step 10: Group jobs of equal value
Once scores have been agreed, use the results to identify jobs of comparable value.
Jobs with similar overall scores can be grouped into the same job grade or category, depending on the organisation's chosen approach.
This is an important distinction: the evaluation score tells you the relative value of the job. The classification step groups jobs of equal or comparable value.
For the standard point factor approach, the total score is produced by combining the weighted scores across the factors and subfactors. Those results can then be used to create or review job grades.
Output: A documented set of job groups or grades, with the rationale for how jobs have been grouped.
Happy with your job evaluation?
You've now established which jobs are of equal value and how they are classified. The next step is to see what your pay data tells you.
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FAQs
What is the point factor method?
Every job is scored against the same factors: skills, responsibility, effort and working conditions. Each factor breaks into subfactors, such as interpersonal and communication skills under skills, and each subfactor has defined levels of increasing complexity.
A job gets a level on every relevant subfactor. The levels are then converted into points, with weightings reflecting the relative importance of different factors and subfactors. The result is one comparable score per job, regardless of department, title or who currently holds it.
Do I have to evaluate every role on its own?
No, every distinct job, not every person.
The test is whether the day to day content is the same, not whether the title matches. Where a role genuinely varies between people, for example because responsibilities or seniority differ under the same title, those variations may need to be evaluated separately.
Do I need to use the point factor method?
Not necessarily.
The EIGE toolkit provides different approaches depending on the size and complexity of the organisation.
For larger organisations with many different roles, the standard point factor method provides a comprehensive analytical approach. Small and medium sized organisations with fewer and more similar roles can use pair comparison, while micro organisations can use a graduated factor comparison approach.
The underlying principle remains the same: jobs should be compared using objective, gender neutral criteria based on skills, responsibility, effort and working conditions.
Do I run pay gap reporting by job families?
No, not simply by job family or job title.
The relevant comparison is between categories of workers performing the same work or work of equal value. The job evaluation and classification process provides the basis for identifying those categories.
Two jobs with the same title can have different requirements and therefore different evaluation outcomes. Equally, two jobs with very different titles can be of equal value if their overall demands are comparable.
What does scoring a factor actually look like?
Skills is useful to walk through because it contains several distinct subfactors, including knowledge, interpersonal and communication skills, problem solving, planning and organisational skills, and physical skills.
Take two roles a committee might instinctively rank the other way round:
Senior engineer: Communicates technical specifications internally, mostly in writing. Scores level 2 for interpersonal and communication skills.
Customer service representative: Handles complaints from a wide range of customers, adapts communication to different audiences and independently manages upset customers. Scores level 3.
The customer facing role, often assumed to be less "skilled", scores higher on this particular subfactor.
That's what splitting factors into subfactors is for. It stops communication demands being waved away as a personality trait instead of counted as a professional skill.
What if we already use Hay, Mercer or another established methodology?
You may not need to replace it.
Many organisations already use established job evaluation systems such as Korn Ferry Hay, Mercer IPE or WTW's Global Grading System.
The important question is whether the existing system has been designed and applied using objective, gender neutral criteria that recognise the four core factors: skills, responsibility, effort and working conditions.
The EIGE toolkit itself is not intended to replace existing systems. Its glossary notes that existing tools and systems can support implementation of the equal pay principle, provided the assessment is based on objective, gender neutral criteria.
The compliance work may therefore be to audit how the existing framework has actually been applied, identify potential gender bias, and map existing scores and classifications onto the organisation's pay transparency requirements.
The logic does not change: evaluate the work actually performed by the role, not which title sounds bigger, and check whether the framework gives appropriate weight to demands that may historically have been undervalued in women dominated jobs.
Resources from the EU toolkit
Based on the European Institute for Gender Equality and European Commission's EU wide guidelines on gender neutral job evaluation and classification, Step by step toolkit, published in 2026. The toolkit is voluntary guidance designed to help organisations implement gender neutral job evaluation and classification. It does not itself guarantee legal compliance.
The toolkit provides:
A detailed factor and subfactor plan covering skills, responsibility, effort and working conditions.
Different evaluation pathways for micro organisations, small and medium sized organisations, and larger organisations.
Supporting Excel tools for each pathway.
Templates including a project outline, worker questionnaire, interview guide, invitation letters, job profile and standard job description.
A glossary of key terms.
Case studies showing how organisations can apply the methods.
Guidance for workers and trade unions.
Full EIGE toolkit and supporting materials
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