Salary Simulation
Salary Simulation
Salary Simulation is an interactive what-if simulator: pick an existing employee and adjust their salary or gender, or add a hypothetical new hire, and immediately see how the mean/median pay gap for their group and role would change. Useful for testing the effect of a pay proposal before committing to it.
If the Variable pay feature is enabled, an “Include variable pay” checkbox appears at the top of the page (the same checkbox also appears on the Overview, Group Insights, Individual Analysis, Classification table and Salary Band). Checking it adds each employee’s this-year bonus/commission on top of base salary before the comparison figures (medians, current gap) are computed — otherwise base salary alone is shown, exactly as before.
Every amount in the comparison table and the cards is a full-time equivalent (salary ÷ working-time share), so part-timers and full-timers are compared on the same basis. You enter the proposed salary as an actual monthly salary; for a part-timer it is converted to full time before it’s compared with the group’s highest salary under “Internal Parity”. Example: 25,000 for someone at 50 % equals 50,000 full-time, so it is above a 45,000 group max. A hypothetical new hire is treated as full-time.
The “Equal-work group” list and the comparison group follow the same grouping as the rest of Salary Mapping: when an employee has a job category, it is used instead of the Equal work group field. Picking an employee therefore preselects their job category.
Anonymity protection: a median, mean, pay gap or the group’s highest salary is only shown when the selection has at least as many employees as the organisation’s anonymity threshold (minimum group size, never below 3). If the group is too small you see “Hidden (too few)” instead of an amount — the headcount is still shown. The figures after the simulation are hidden using the same threshold over the same people as the current figures: the person you are adjusting still counts as themselves (only their salary changes), so a group shown before is also shown after. The hypothetical new hire — or an employee you simulate into a group or role other than their own — does not count towards the threshold, since that salary is your own input. If the organisation restricts who may see salaries (Salary visibility), a role without salary access cannot open the simulation.
Every figure for anyone allowed to see salaries. The salary simulation already requires permission to see salaries, so anyone who can open it sees every median, mean and pay gap — also for groups and roles with one or two people — with the note “Showing all figures – you are allowed to see individual salaries”. The group’s highest salary is still never shown, since it is always one person’s salary.
How it is calculated. The pay gap = (men’s pay − women’s pay) ÷ men’s pay × 100, for both the median and the mean, on full-time pay in the selected group. The simulation only replaces the selected person’s pay (or adds the hypothetical new hire) and recalculates. Example: women on SEK 30,000, 30,000 and 36,000 and men on SEK 33,000, 35,000, 37,000 and 43,000 have a median gap of (36,000 − 30,000) ÷ 36,000 = 16.7 %. Raising Anna from 30,000 to 33,000 makes the women’s median 33,000 and the gap (36,000 − 33,000) ÷ 36,000 = 8.3 %. The colour follows the system parameter Pay Gap Warning Threshold (normally 5 %): red when the gap is at least the threshold, amber from half the threshold and green below that. Internal parity compares the proposed salary, converted to full time, with the group’s highest full-time pay. Every concept, with one shared worked example, is in the article Concepts and calculations.