How do I determine which positions are of equal value?

Skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions determine equal value

Jobs are of equal value when they rank to a comparable level on objective, gender-neutral criteria — not when the job title or department happen to match. The directive lists four criteria that play a role: the skills the job requires, the effort it costs, the responsibility that comes with it and the conditions under which the work is performed. A secretary and a warehouse worker can fall into the same category this way, while two jobs with the same title at different locations do not necessarily: it is about the content of the work, not the label on it.

In practice, this translates into a job classification system: a method to evaluate jobs against the four criteria and place them into categories of equal value work. These categories are not merely an intellectual exercise — they form the basis for reporting on pay differences and for the response an employee receives when asking what their category earns on average, broken down by gender. In the Netherlands, the bill introducing these obligations is still pending before the Second Chamber, but a job classification based on objective criteria does not happen in a week; anyone who wants to be ready by the target date of 1 January 2027 should start on it now, regardless of whether that date shifts.

This follows from Articles 4, 7 and 9 of the directive

The four criteria — skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions — are set out in Article 4, paragraph 4, of Directive (EU) 2023/970, which links remuneration to objective, gender-neutral standards. That the same directive uses "work of equal value" rather than equal job titles follows from Article 4 as a whole. That this classification into categories is then used for something is evident from Article 7, paragraph 1, on requesting the average remuneration level per category, and from Article 9 on reporting pay differences per category of workers.