Where does it come from?

Since 1957, the Treaty of Rome enshrined equal pay: “Each Member State shall ensure application of the principle of equal remuneration for men and women for equal work.”

In 2019, France created the professional Gender Equality Index and made it mandatory for companies with 50+ employees.

Methodology

For companies with 50–250 employees, four indicators:

• Pay gap between women and men, calculated using average remuneration by age cohort and equivalent job categories
• Gap in individual pay raises between women and men
• Percentage of women receiving a raise in the year following maternity leave, if raises occurred during the leave period
• Number of employees of the under‑represented sex among the ten highest earners

For 250+ employees, one additional indicator applies: the promotion rate gap between women and men.

Good news

Coercion is sometimes necessary to encourage equality—much like today’s parallel ESG reporting obligations.

Completion has improved: by March 2021, two‑thirds of the ~40,000 companies concerned had reported. By November, 67% of companies with 50–250 employees, and 90% of those with 250–1,000 employees, had complied (per parliamentary report).

Scores are steadily improving, particularly for companies with 1,000+ employees: average 88 points in 2021 vs 87.1 in 2020 and 82.9 in 2019.

Limits of the Index

The requirement to grant a raise upon return from maternity leave is already a legal obligation—so why does complying add points?

On pay raises, the metric counts the number of raises, not their amount. Trivially, raising women by 10€ and men by 1,000€ wouldn’t lower the score.

Most companies earn good scores, which doesn’t strongly push action. Some view the task as burdensome. A CEREQ study notes some companies produce the Index only to comply and criticize its administrative overhead.

The study’s core critique: by focusing on unexplained pay gaps within companies, the Index overlooks root causes—women’s overrepresentation in part‑time and low‑paid roles, and in undervalued sectors/occupations where skills are deemed “natural” and thus under‑recognized.