Until now, ranking jobs was largely an internal choice left to each company. That could change: on 10 September 2026, a bill transposing the European pay transparency directive was filed with the Senate and now awaits review. In parallel, on 27 October 2026, the French Ministry of Labour released the French version of the EIGE toolkit, designed to evaluate and rank jobs without gender bias.

🔎 What are we talking about?
Directive (EU) 2023/970 on pay transparency, and its forthcoming transposition into French law. The goal: to compare jobs not by their title but by their actual value, in order to measure and close pay gaps between women and men.

🏢 Which employers?
Ultimately all of them, with pathways tailored to organisation size: a lighter approach for structures with fewer than 10 employees, a dedicated pathway for SMEs from 10 to 249 employees, and a more structured method from 250 employees upward.

📋 The method: evaluating jobs by 4 criteria
→ Skills
→ Responsibilities
→ Effort
→ Working conditions

A step-by-step approach in three stages: prepare the evaluation, evaluate the jobs using the same criteria, then adjust the classifications and pay scales.

⚠️ What the bill provides
→ Group together jobs of equal value, even when their duties differ
→ Measure pay gaps between women and men within these categories
→ In companies with at least 50 employees, each employee may request their own pay level and the average pay, broken down by sex, for their category

💡 How to prepare?
The toolkit already provides ready-to-use resources: spreadsheets, questionnaires, interview guides, job description templates and case studies.
For HR departments, three areas to review right now:

  • professional classifications
  • job descriptions
  • pay scales

📌 Key takeaway
The toolkit is a methodological support: it does not replace the forthcoming French legal provisions and does not, on its own, guarantee company compliance. The text still has to be reviewed by Parliament and may change.

Pay transparency does not start with publishing salaries. It starts with how we evaluate jobs.