25.6%: Barely more than a quarter of private employment positions are actually affected by the calculation of pay gaps, within the meaning of the Professional Equality Index. This measurement tool, born in 2018, subjects companies with more than fifty employees to an obligation of results in terms of gender equality. In fact, 43.9% of jobs are excluded because they belong to structures with fewer than fifty employees. For the rest, either they were excluded by the government’s methodology, or the companies concerned declared their index “incalculable”.
This figure, among others, demonstrates the numerous flaws in the index, pointed out by a team of researchers from the Institute of Public Policy (IPP). Their results are summarized in a contribution for the scientific mediation project “What do we know about work? ” of Interdisciplinary laboratory for public policy evaluation (Liepp), broadcast in collaboration with Presses de Sciences Po on the Employment channel of the Lemonde.fr site.
The authors first recall the functioning of this new type of rating grid. Each company is rated on one hundred points, a total which adds up a certain number of parameters: the hourly wage gap between women and men (40 points), an indicator of salary mobility (35), salary increases for women at the outcome of maternity leave (15), and the number of women and men among the ten highest earners in the company (10). In the event of a score below 75/100, companies have three years to implement corrective measures.
If the average score of companies has continued to increase, going from 82.4/100 in 2018 to 85.9/100 in 2021, the researchers highlight that the implementation of the Index has not real effect on gender inequalities in the companies concerned. In fact, companies that publish the Index do not particularly reduce discrimination more quickly than others.
The IPP analysis also calls into question the methodology of the Index, which is complex and time-consuming – which is not an easy thing for SMEs without human resources departments – in addition to excluding from the calculations a large part of the employed population (in particular those with less than six months’ seniority in the company). Furthermore, certain shortcuts such as the application of a tolerance threshold (all deviations less than 5% are reduced to 0) give “a closer representation of the gender pay gap”.
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