Complying with the French Gender Equality Index
This article provides information on legally required pay equity reporting in France. It gives an overview of which employers need to take action, what the deliverables are, how to get started, and how to use the PayAnalytics software to help meet local requirements.
France’s current pay gap reporting requirement was introduced in 2018 and rolled out gradually. The required report (Index de l’égalité professionnelle femmes-hommes) is known as the “Gender Equality Index” in English.
The goal is to provide a simple, reliable, and practical way to end gender pay inequity. Companies must not only publish pay gap information but also document the measures they are taking to close the gap. The report also looks at the specific impacts of gender differences. For example, it is designed to detect whether employees who take maternity leave get raises at the same rate as those who do not. This helps detect any ingrained bias against working mothers.
In this article we will break down the French Gender Pay Gap Reporting and help you to answer four questions:
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Please keep in mind that the articles in the PayAnalytics Help Center do not offer legal advice.
1. Who does it apply to?
Today, all organizations with 50 or more employees have to publish their gender equality index every year before March 1st. Companies that have employed 1,000 or more people for three or more consecutive years have an additional requirement. They must calculate and publish any gaps in gender representation among their executive managers and members of their governing bodies. This report is also due annually by March 1st.
2. What is the requirement?
Depending on the company size, employers must include four or five specific indicators.
The gender pay gap within comparable jobs and age groups. This indicator has the highest value and can contribute up to 40 points to the index.
Difference in individual raises between men and women in comparable jobs. 35 points for companies with 50-250 employees, 20 points for those with 250+ employees.
Difference in the promotion rate between men and women in comparable jobs. This indicator is only required for companies with 250+ employees and can contribute up to 15 points.
Employees receiving raises when returning from maternity leave. 15 points.
Gender distribution among the 10 highest paid employees. 10 points.
3. How does PayAnalytics help you to meet the requirement?
PayAnalytics provides an easy and streamlined way for users to create reports that meet the legal requirements in France. First, you need to upload your dataset with the relevant data points:
Preparing your dataset
Note that a dataset containing at least the following data needs to be imported prior to generating the report:
unique employee ID (mandatory for all datasets),
age,
salary,
the employee’s job (one column at the reference period start and one at the reference period end. If necessary, PayAnalytics allows you to map job roles to four socioeconomic categories defined by the French government),
designations for employees who received raises,
designations for employees who returned from maternity leave, with a column indicating how long employees were on maternity/adoption leave.
Generating the report:
Once you have completed uploading your dataset, perhaps reviewed the data in the system to detect any data errors (see Reviewing your data article for more information), you can navigate to Reports in the left navigation bar.
Once the Report section has been opened, click on Create new report, and scroll down until you find the Gender equality index (France) report in the Government mandated reports, as illustrated on the following picture:
Creating Gender equality index (France) report
Once the Gender Equality Index report has been selected, you will be directed to the report configuration page where you configure the mandatory fields for the report. Once completed, click Generate report, and view the report in Excel.
4. Which steps should we take next?
Organizations must submit their index to the Ministry of Labor through an online form, and it( should be made publicly available, identifiable, and accessible on the organization's website, not more than 3 clicks away from the main page. Each employer must also present the index internally to its Social and Economic Committee (CSE).
The goal is to have a total index sum of 85 or higher. If that not been achieved, no actions are necessary.
If the total score is below 85, the following actions are necessary:
On its website, the organization has to publish its development goals for each indicator where the maximum score is not reached. This information must remain available there until the goals have been reached.
Organizations must submit the same information to the Ministry of Labor and to their CSE via BDESE (the economic and social database).
In addition to all the above, if the total index is below 75, organizations have further requirements to fulfill:
Define their goals and corrective measures for each indicator through a collective agreement or a unilateral decision, which should have been filed on Téléaccords.
Consult with their CSE for approval.
Internally inform their employees of the goals and corrective measures.
Publish the goals and corrective measures.
There are financial penalties for non-reporting, substandard reporting, or non-implementation of corrective measures. This includes failure to make the reports adequately visible and readable online. It also includes corrective measures that are implemented, but inefficient. Penalties can be up to 1% of the company’s annual payroll. There is also a penalty for failure to improve the index score within three years. The penalty here will be proportional to the efforts the organization made to improve its index.
Conclusion and next steps
Beyond providing an easy way for you to create the Gender equality index in PayAnalytics, the system can also help you further on your pay equity journey.
In PayAnalytics, you can run a pay equity analysis, that both measures the adjusted pay gap and also provides raise suggestions as to how to reduce it or close it. To learn more, see Creating a compensation model and Getting suggested remediation actions.
Understanding workforce diversity is key to understanding why a raw (unadjusted) pay gap might exist. You may want to check out our Workforce Analytics report and how it helps to understand your organization’s changing workforce. To learn more, see Workforce analytics.
Once a pay gap is closed, the compensation assistant helps ensure that the pay gap does not come creeping back when new employees are hired, or current employees are promoted. For more information on the Compensation assistant, see Using the Compensation assistant.
If you would like further support around French Gender equality index reporting, please don't hesitate to reach out for assistance through the Help Center support channel or reach out to our pay equity consultants at clientservicespe@beqom.com.