The seven data points you must report, and which are public
Gender pay gap reporting under Article 9 is not a single headline number. It is a set of seven measures, and they do not all go to the same audience. Six are reported to a national monitoring body and made available to all workers; the seventh is provided internally to workers and their representatives. Knowing which is which shapes how you prepare the data.
The six that are reported and made available
- The gender pay gap.
- The gender pay gap in complementary or variable components (for example bonuses, allowances and other pay on top of basic salary).
- The median gender pay gap.
- The median gender pay gap in complementary or variable components.
- The proportion of female and male workers receiving complementary or variable components.
- The proportion of women and men in each quartile pay band.
These go to the monitoring body designated by your member state and are made available to all workers. They give an outside reader both a mean and a median view, a read on how bonuses are distributed by sex, and a picture of where women and men sit across the pay distribution.
The seventh, provided internally
The seventh measure is the gender pay gap by categories of workers, broken down by ordinary basic salary and by complementary or variable components. This one is provided internally to workers and their representatives rather than published. It is also the measure that does the heavy lifting, because it is calculated per category of workers doing the same work or work of equal value, and it is the figure that can trigger the joint pay assessment.
Categories of workers and equal value. A category groups workers doing the same work or work of equal value, judged on objective, gender-neutral criteria such as skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions. Getting these groupings right is the hardest part of preparing to report, because the by-category gap is measured within each group, not across the whole workforce.
A worked shape
Imagine a 400-person employer. The quartile measure sorts everyone by pay into four equal bands and reports the share of women and men in each. If women are 55% of the bottom quartile and 30% of the top quartile, that pattern shows up plainly even before you look at the gap figures. The mean and median gaps then quantify the difference, and the by-category breakdown tells you whether the difference sits inside specific groups of comparable roles. A comp team reading these together can see not just that a gap exists but where it lives.
Get the data structure right first
Because the report is built from your own pay records, the work starts with data quality: a clean split of basic salary versus variable pay, sex recorded consistently, and a defensible set of worker categories. If the categories are vague or the variable-pay data is messy, the numbers will be too, and a weak by-category figure is exactly what invites a joint pay assessment. The paid country report sets out the disclosure detail for your member state and a checklist for preparing the data; the free checker tells you whether and when you report.