When are compensation criteria gender-neutral?

Criteria that look only at the work itself are gender-neutral

Remuneration criteria are gender-neutral when they exclusively describe the content of the role — the skills it requires, the effort it demands, the responsibility it carries and the circumstances in which the work is performed — and do not, directly or indirectly, make a difference between men and women. Direct discrimination occurs when a criterion explicitly refers to sex; this is rare in practice today. Indirect discrimination occurs when a criterion appears neutral but in practice predominantly affects one sex — for example, assigning substantial weight to physical strength in roles where this is not functionally necessary, or weighting experience more heavily than skill in a way that particularly disadvantages returners after leave.

In practice, this means that a role classification is only called gender-neutral when the four factors — skills, effort, responsibility, working conditions — are weighted in the same way for each role, regardless of whether the role has traditionally been performed by men or women. A criterion such as "availability at weekends" may be objective for a role where it is necessary, but becomes contestable once it serves as a general weighting criterion while having little to do with the actual content of the role. Assessing this is not a matter of good intentions, but of the systematic method by which roles are compared with one another.

Legal basis: Article 4 of the Directive and the Equal Treatment Act

The requirement that remuneration must be based on objective, gender-neutral criteria is set out in Article 4(4) of Directive (EU) 2023/970, with skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions listed as the four factors. For Dutch employers, the prohibition on discrimination in remuneration on grounds of sex is not new: the Equal Treatment Act already prohibits this, regardless of the status of the bill transposing the Directive. The Directive adds a systematic test — the role classification — but the underlying principle that criteria must not directly or indirectly discriminate is already in place.