Pay equality toolkit: Conduct gender-neutral job evaluations
This gender-neutral job evaluation tool can assist in removing gender bias from performance management in your organisation. Removing this bias can support your work towards pay equality and assist your business with challenges such as retaining and promoting current employees as well as broadening the recruitment pool to include all genders.
What steps will I need to conduct a gender-neutral job evaluation?
Step 1. Focus on one role at a time
It is useful to begin with roles that are held by more than one employee if possible, e.g. sales managers.
Step 2. Gather data about the role
Determine the purpose, key duties and responsibilities, competencies, and skills that are associated with the role. You may like to use our capability matrix template to collect this information. Share this with the employees in the role and ensure you have captured both the relevant criteria and proficiency descriptions accurately.
Step 3. Check the data for gendered bias
Consider whether the role is stereotypically ‘a woman’s job’ (e.g. nurse, receptionist or cashier), or a done by a man (e.g. programmer, truck driver or analyst). Also consider your own biases that might influence your evaluation of the role. Pay attention to the language and the way soft skills are described. For example, a receptionist’s skills could be described as ‘pleasant phone manner’ whereas a more gender-neutral description would be ‘strong verbal communication skills’.
Step 4. Identify gendered language in the job title
Job titles can play a significant part in shaping people’s perceptions of the job content.
Often employers use different titles for the jobs of men and women who are doing essentially the same work – for example, women may be ‘secretaries’ while men are ‘administrators’. This can denote a status difference, reflected in a pay difference which is based on gender discrimination and not on the content of the work done.
Check the job title and consider more gender-neutral language that reflects the responsibilities of the role.
Step 5. Create a performance evaluation matrix for the role
Use the data you’ve collected as criteria in a performance evaluation matrix. Determine an evaluation scale such as:
- Exceeding expectations
- Achieving
- Improvement needed
- Not evident
You can use our template to make this easier.
Step 6. Create a performance evaluation matrix for the role
Use one matrix with each employee to evaluate their performance, and as evidence for promotion and pay increases.
