1. Member States shall take the necessary measures to ensure that employers have pay structures ensuring equal pay for equal work or work of equal value.
2. Member States shall, in consultation with equality bodies, take the necessary measures to ensure that analytical tools or methodologies are made available and are easily accessible to support and guide the assessment and comparison of the value of work in accordance with the criteria set out in this Article. Those tools or methodologies shall allow employers and/or the social partners to easily establish and use gender-neutral job evaluation and classification systems that exclude any pay discrimination on grounds of sex.
3. Where appropriate, the Commission may update Union-wide guidelines related to gender-neutral job evaluation and classification systems, in consultation with the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE).
4. Pay structures shall be such as to enable the assessment of whether workers are in a comparable situation in regard to the value of work on the basis of objective, gender-neutral criteria agreed with workers’ representatives where such representatives exist. Those criteria shall not be based directly or indirectly on workers’ sex. They shall include skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions, and, if appropriate, any other factors which are relevant to the specific job or position. They shall be applied in an objective gender-neutral manner, excluding any direct or indirect discrimination based on sex. In particular, relevant soft skills shall not be undervalued.