Higher seminar in Economics: The meaning of weighting method in a gender-neutral job evaluation tool – A misinterpretation

Stig Blomskog, Södertörn University, will present a paper titled “The meaning of weighting decisions in a gender-neutral job evaluation – A misinterpretation”. The seminar will be held in Swedish and hybrid form. Please contact alexandra.allard@sh.se for the Zoom link.

Abstract

We perform an analysis of the weighting instruction in a gender-neutral job evaluation tool constructed by International Labor Office (ILO).

In the ILO-tool the evaluation of jobs is based on an overall evaluation of job-related factors such as required skills, responsibility levels, effort and working conditions. The outcome is that the jobs are assigned measures in terms of weighted sum of scores, where the scores represent the partial evaluation of the jobs-related factors. The constructed measures are then used as the grounds for a gender-neutral pay grading of the jobs at work places.

The conclusion of the analysis is that the weighting instruction in the ILO-tool is based on a conceptual mistake regarding the function of weights in additive value models. The mistake is that the weights in the ILO-tool are assumed to represent the relative importance of the job-related factors. We demonstrate that the weighting decisisons will determine so called trade-offs between the job-related factors, which have a significant impact on the pay grading of the jobs. However, in the ILO-tool the notion ”trade-offs” is not applied. It is therefore likely that the users of the ILO-tool will not corretly interpret the consequences of their weighting decisons for the pay grading of the jobs. Thus, the validity of job evaluations using the ILO-tool can be questioned.

The ILO-tool is recommended by the EU Commission. Since the ILO-tool is regarded as a worldwide guideline for performing gender neutral job evaluations this conceptual mistake should be corrected.