Use your headcount to establish which reporting band you fall in and when your first report is due, assess your readiness on the seven obligations of Directive 2023/970, and compute per job category the mean and median pay gap, the variable-pay gap and the quartile distribution — including the 5% threshold that triggers a joint pay assessment.
If the pay gap in a category of workers doing equal or equivalent work reaches 5% or more, and it cannot be explained by objective, gender-neutral criteria, a joint pay assessment with the workers’ representatives follows. That is not a sanction but a procedure: analysis, explanation and, where needed, remediation. The first step is therefore the figures themselves — and those are not one percentage but seven statistics, each showing something different.
Mean and median often diverge, and the variable-pay gap is usually wider than the fixed-pay gap because both the amount and the share receiving it differ. The quartile distribution shows something else again: where men and women sit in the pay structure. The tool computes all of them, flags the categories that reach the threshold, and records the whole set with tool version and dataset vintage, so the figures are traceable when the works council asks.