EQUALITY GUIdE - KU Leuven

172 Equality Guide
role, to support, to accompany, to contribute, to look after and to help. In this way these
undesirable gender aspects confirm traditional role patterns for men and women.
Furthermore, the work that women execute is often described in such a way that the
importance is not stressed, compared to male colleagues performing the same job, for
example:
! ‘he gives/controls’ versus ‘she accompanies’;
! ‘he co-ordinates versus ‘she remains in contact’.
4.3.3. Application
This step-by-step plan for gender-aware job descriptions is an instrument for equal opportunities.
It is a handy and easy to use tool that requires little knowledge about the job
rating system. An easy form with some suggestions, recommendations and exercises will
lead respondents through the five steps to set up gender-aware job descriptions. The tool
can be used as a monitoring and evaluation tool. These tools are useful to check whether
progress has been made towards gender equality.
This tool can thus be useful to help set up job descriptions and to indicate the presence of
inequalities in gender. The tool is still being tested within the K.U.Leuven. In a first phase,
it was tested on the documents the HR-department generated in the scope of the HAYproject.
Results of the application of the tool on the document ‘manual for job descriptions’, that
was generated by the HR-department for the job holders within the HAY-project:
! Examples of job titles containing the female form of the Dutch word for ‘department
secretary’. This is a job title often used at the K.U.Leuven but it is not a sex-neutral
term. In this case, the K.U.Leuven sets a bad example, giving the impression that the
gender problem is not important instead of encouraging job holders to use genderneutral
terms. This could lead to job holders, who provide the information for the job
description, not being aware of the problem. Our suggestion: set an example by using
gender-neutral job titles and adding some information about sex-neutral job titles. An
exercise may make things clear.
! Furthermore, within the given examples of activities and responsibility, no genderneutral
language was used. For example, the job title of ‘team leader’ with the responsibility
of ‘organizing, coordinating, and following the activities of the co-workers of his
team etc.’ One needs to pay attention to avoiding the use of reference words and
writing in a gender-neutral way. Therefore the tool pays special attention to the subject
of gender awareness and gender-aware language. This tool can help job holders
to write and give information in the right way.
! The manual pays attention to quality control in general and in the use of clear language,
but not to gender-aware language. We would like to suggest adding the steps
of the tool to the ‘quality control’ section as the tool can also be used as an evaluation
instrument.