Although it has been compulsory for companies with between 50 and 250 employees to publish a gender equality index for over a year now, many SMEs still do not see it as a priority.
What is the professional equality index?
The Professional Equality Index was created in 2018, and aims to enable companies to concretely address existing inequalities between women and men in their workforce.
It must be calculated and published on the company website before March 1st each year, and communicated to the labor inspectorate and the social and economic committee.
The index is calculated on a total of 100 points, based on 4 or 5 indicators depending on the size of the company. The data taken into account to establish the final index are as follows:
- Parity among the 10 highest-paid executives;
- The number of employees who received a pay rise after returning from maternity leave ;
- Gap in the distribution of promotions in companies with more than 250 employees ;
- The gender pay gap ;
- The difference in the distribution of individual increases.
If the result obtained is less than 75 points out of 100, the company must implement corrective measures, and has 3 years to reach the minimum of 75 points, failing which it is obliged to pay a penalty of up to 1% of its payroll.
Companies with at least 1,000 employees have been required to publish this index every year since March 1, 2019. Companies with at least 250 employees have been required to do so since September 1, 2019, and those with at least 50 employees since March 1, 2020.
SMEs publish their professional equality index for the second year running
While companies with more than 1,000 employees seem to have taken on board this index, SMEs with between 50 and 250 employees are only gradually getting on board. By March 2020, half of them had not met this obligation.
This failure is due less to a lack of will than to a structural inability to provide the requested data. Human relations departments, already hard-pressed, have been even more so since the start of the health crisis, and the skills needed to calculate this index are not always available in-house.
As a result, many SMEs call on a lawyer to calculate and file the index, sometimes only when they find themselves up against the wall, faced with a formal notice from the labor inspectorate.
While Medef takes a positive view of this gender equality index, the trade unions do not, criticizing the self-rating principle and the lack of transparency in the way the final score is calculated.
In a joint press release published on March 8, 2021, the CFDT, CGT, FO, CFE-CGC, UNSA, FSU and Solidaires unions demanded that transparency obligations be strengthened, and that company directors release "the necessary wage catch-up envelopes".
The unions also want the "obligation to achieve results in equal pay" to be extended to the civil service "through binding measures".
Mixed results
On Monday March 8, the first results of the professional equality index were published. While more and more companies are complying with this obligation - 7 out of 10 this year, compared with 6 out of 10 last year - the results show that there is still a great deal of work to be done.
Admittedly, the overall score has improved, rising from 84 out of 100 a year ago to 85 out of 100 this year. However, only 2% of companies that published their index on time achieved a score of 100 out of 100.
In addition, it has been a legal requirement for 15 years that employees returning from maternity leave receive raises, provided that other employees have benefited from individual or collective increases in their absence. However, 13% of the companies that published their index do not comply with this obligation, and some have done nothing to remedy the situation over the past 3 years.
Only one company in four complies with the parity criterion for senior management, and the situation is worsening: a year ago, 37% of companies with over 1,000 employees had 0 or 1 woman among their top 10 earners. This year, the figure has risen to 43%.
Despite union demands, the professional equality index and its calculation method will not be revised in 2021. On the other hand, a decree is expected to oblige companies to give greater visibility to their results on their websites.