Published April 2026
“Working on Equal Pay always requires a costly introduction of job grades”. This is a fallacy. Formal job grading is not a prerequisite for initial analysis.
Firstly, remember that Equal Pay is the principle of ‘equal pay for equal work’. Equal work must be defined – often supported by a job architecture where comparable roles fall into the same job grade. How is it applied in practice?
Consider companies operating without formal job grades.
This means the organisation did not associate a grade or rank to their jobs (e.g., level 1, 2, 3, etc.). However, for each job, there is still an implicit understanding of required skills, responsibilities, and the level of complexity. That is, the organisation recognises that a CEO works at a fundamentally different level than a senior Developer or a Technician.
These implicit structures can be leveraged to build an inexpensive proxy job grading system i.e., a defensible approach for initial Equal Pay analyses. Such proxies may include role seniority, reporting lines, required qualifications, experience levels, or other objective indicators of job value.
When applied consistently and documented properly, these proxies can provide a reasonable and defensible estimate for initial analysis. The results then inform the next steps.
Especially smaller companies will likely learn that the proxy grading can be a good estimate for Equal Pay purposes – often without the need for a costly, full-scale job grading project. Over time, the proxy can be enhanced and formalised, for example through a more fine-tuned methodology, improved documentation, and ensuring reproducibility of results.
This is not to say that no further actions are necessary. For example, under the EU Pay Transparency Directive, employees can request pay information based on equal work (and work of equal value). This requires organisations to clearly explain and justify their definition of ‘equal work’ using objective, gender-neutral criteria, which in turn increases the need for transparent and well-documented role evaluation.
In that sense, proxy job grading is a quick and effective starting point. But organisations should be prepared to formalise their approach as regulatory requirements and organisational complexity increase.
I explore these questions in more detail in my book “The Equal Pay Guide – a practical framework for understanding, explaining, and managing Gender Pay, Equal Pay, Pay Equity & Pay Transparency”.
If you would like to conduct rigorous Equal Pay analyses and translate insights into impactful actions, you can find more information here - link to The Equal Pay Guide (available on multiple Amazon marketplaces)