Nicola Harkin

We haven't seen draft legislation yet.

The directive says that member states need to provide guidance and toolkits to employers to help them to prepare for the directive.

We haven't seen that yet.

from the department yet.

We've seen one toolkit come from a European institution around gender equality.

So there's still a lot that we don't know.

So while organisations are working very hard, we know organisations are putting a huge amount of time, resources and financial investment into preparing for the patron transparency directive.

The reality is, in the absence of certainty and legal certainty about exactly what they must do to prepare,

There's only so much they can do and there's a lot that remains to be seen before they can finalise any sort of preparations for the directive.

Not necessarily.

So the job ad will have to be drafted in gender neutral terms.

Now, we would have always, or certainly in more recent years, I think in our experience, employers are already doing that.

They're drafting and putting the gender neutral language into job advertisements.

What the directive says around salary and salary ranges is that information around the initial pay level or pay range must be given to a candidate either in the job ad itself or

or prior to interview or otherwise prior to the commencement of employment.

So we did see some draft legislation in a general scheme about a year and a half ago.

And within that general scheme, it suggested that the information would have to be in the job ad itself.

In IBEC, we would disagree with that because when you look at the aim of this provision, the aim of this provision is to put candidates into an equal bargaining position when negotiating a possible pay package for a particular role.

The purpose of the provision is not to force businesses to share.

For some businesses, it will be commercially sensitive information.