EU-wide guidelines on gender-neutral job evaluation and classification: Step-by-step toolkit

Saveur Européenne undertook a full review of its job titles and descriptions, guided by Tool 6. The job evaluation committee applied the toolkit’s checklist to remove gender-biased language and broaden overly narrow descriptions.

Some of the changes included:

• Waiter’ and ‘waitress’ were standardised to ‘service workers’
• ‘Salesman’ was updated to ‘sales representative’
• ‘Kitchen maid’ was changed to ‘kitchen assistant’
• ‘Executive secretary’ became ‘executive assistant’
• ‘Finance and admin officer’ became ‘finance and admin director’
• ‘Senior communications assistant’ became ‘communications team lead’

Job descriptions were also rewritten to reflect responsibilities better. For example, the head chef role was no longer described simply as ‘responsible for all cooking tasks’. The revised profile recognised team management, financial oversight, menu planning and responsibility for food safety.

Similarly, the finance and admin director role was reframed from a list of clerical duties to a role that included setting fiscal strategy, leading annual budgeting and liaising with external auditors.

Using the toolkit’s standard job description template, every role was updated so that descriptions aligned with the actual skills, responsibility, effort and working conditions identified during the job evaluation and classification.