Cepac Gender Pay Gap : Women Get A Forum, Men Get The Board

The Cepac gender pay gap report records a workforce that is 86% male, women earning 10.7% less on the mean hourly measure, a mean bonus gap of 33.4% and women most heavily represented in the bottom quarter of the payroll. Meanwhile, the current Cepac boardroom remains entirely male. Perhaps the discrimination at Cepac is not limited to people with disabilities after all.

The Spreadsheet Has Entered The Witness Box

Corporate equality reports are wonderful little artefacts. They arrive scrubbed, sanitised and emotionally refrigerated, written in the sort of language normally reserved for airport signage and the instructions on the back of a fire extinguisher. Nobody excludes anybody. Nobody hoards the good chairs. There are simply “historic patterns”, “representation challenges” and initiatives scheduled to improve matters at some agreeable point beyond the current reporting period.

Then the numbers testify. Cepac’s Gender Pay Gap Report, using the statutory snapshot date of 5 April 2025, covers 449 employees across Darlington, Doncaster, Rawcliffe Bridge and Rotherham. Of those employees, 86% are men and 14% are women. Women’s mean hourly pay is 10.7% lower than men’s, while the median Cepac gender pay gap is 7.9%.

Then payroll opens the bonus drawer and somebody ought to fetch an undertaker. Women’s mean bonus pay is 33.4% lower than men’s, while the median bonus gap stands at 10.4%. Bonus participation is uneven too, with 60.1% of men receiving bonus pay compared with 50.8% of women. Thirty-three point fucking four per cent is not a crack in the pavement. It is somewhere you could lose a forklift.

Cepac’s median hourly gender pay gap has improved from 14.5% in 2024 to 7.9% in 2025. Lovely. Pin the improvement certificate to the noticeboard beside the fire marshal rota, because the rest of the spreadsheet is still lying on the table with its toe-tag attached.

Follow The Women Down The Payroll

The Cepac gender pay gap becomes considerably more interesting when the company divides its workforce into pay quartiles. Women account for 14.1% of the highest-paid quarter, collapse to just 7.6% of the upper-middle quartile and reach 13% in the lower-middle group. Then the payroll lift reaches the basement.

Women make up 21.5% of Cepac’s lowest-paid quarter, their highest representation anywhere in the four salary bands. Somewhere between the corporate values page and the wage system, the diversity story appears to have developed a cellar.

That is the beauty of gender pay reporting. Corporate communications gets adjectives, mission statements and professionally photographed people holding pieces of corrugated cardboard. Payroll gets numbers. Numbers are harder to take outside for media training, and Cepac’s numbers show women forming a tiny minority of its workforce while achieving their greatest representation among its lowest-paid employees.

The hierarchy has practically drawn itself. You do not need an elaborate conspiracy, a smoke-filled room or some Victorian factory owner twirling his moustache beside the payroll ledger. Put enough men into enough positions of seniority for long enough and eventually the organisation’s structure begins printing its own autobiography in percentages.

The Bonus Gap Comes With Instructions

Cepac even explains part of its own Cepac gender pay gap. The report points to long-serving male employees and acknowledges that men constitute the majority of line managers and senior managers, where the opportunities to earn higher bonuses are greater. Well, fuck me. Sherlock has found the body and helpfully labelled the murder weapon.

A company reports a 33.4% mean bonus gap between men and women, then explains that men disproportionately occupy the management positions where the larger bonus opportunities live. That is not some irritating footnote parked beneath the numbers. It is the fucking wiring diagram.

Structural inequality rarely requires an accountant creeping through Rotherham at midnight transferring Susan’s bonus into Steve’s wage packet. It accumulates through recruitment, progression, seniority, opportunity and who becomes tomorrow’s candidate because they were yesterday’s manager. Eventually Excel does the unpleasant bit and HR gets handed the corpse found in the accounts ledger.

The Cepac gender pay report is therefore doing something considerably more interesting than reporting two different averages. It is showing the machinery behind them. Men dominate the organisation numerically, men dominate the managerial levels identified as having access to larger bonuses, and the resulting pay figures arrive exactly where you might expect them to.

Women Get A Forum, Men Keep The Boardroom

Here is where TCAP wanders out of accountancy and straight into fucking performance art. Cepac says that in 2022 it appointed a director at board level to champion HR issues affecting women. Apparently the solution to women not being sufficiently represented at the highest levels was to get somebody already inside the highest level to keep an eye on things.

As of August 2026, Companies House lists Cepac Limited’s active individual directors and the boardroom remains entirely male. Ten men occupy the director seats. The revolution has apparently encountered a fairly solid door somewhere between the mentoring programme and Companies House.

Cepac does, however, have a Senior Women’s Forum. The company says the forum was established in 2024 with 18 women in managerial roles and has contributed to matters including menopause support and enhanced maternity provision. Its own current people material continues to praise the forum and the company’s intention to increase the number of female colleagues.

So we arrive at one of those immaculate pieces of corporate architecture that practically writes The Cepac Files itself. Women have a forum in which to discuss the issues affecting women. Men retain every seat on the statutory board governing the fucking company. One room talks about representation while the other one demonstrates it.

Perhaps the minutes make the journey upstairs twice a year. Perhaps somebody places them neatly between the accounts and the psychometric-testing proposal. Either way, there is a substantial difference between being consulted about power and possessing it, and Cepac’s corporate structure currently illustrates that distinction with admirable clarity.

Male Ally Of The Year Enters Carrying The Trophy

Then corporate satire ceased requiring a writer. Craig Mason is Cepac’s Group Resources Director for People & Services, a company director and the signatory to the gender pay report. In 2026 he was also named Male Ally of the Year at the Women in Packaging Excellence Awards.

Consider the tableau. An 86% male workforce, women most heavily represented in the lowest pay quartile, a 33.4% mean bonus gap, an all-male statutory board and a Senior Women’s Forum operating beneath it. Then a man from that board walks up and collects the trophy for helping women.

You could lock Kafka, Armando Iannucci and an HR director inside a corrugated box for six months and they would struggle to improve it. Cepac has achieved the corporate diversity equivalent of maintaining an all-male steakhouse kitchen, establishing a vegetarian advisory panel and presenting the head butcher with a ceremonial courgette.

The wonderful part is that the trophy does not even need attacking. Leave it exactly where it is and place the gender pay report beside it. Male allyship reached Cepac’s trophy cabinet before a woman reached its current statutory boardroom. That sentence does all the heavy lifting while reality sits in the corner looking pleased with itself.

Quick, Fetch The Psychometric Tests

Cepac’s proposals for tackling the Cepac gender pay gap include flexible working, maternity provision, development initiatives and community engagement. Then, buried among the corporate medicine, appears another treatment: psychometric testing during recruitment and promotion assessments.

Of course. The workforce is 86% male, women are proportionally most concentrated in the bottom pay quartile, men dominate the management positions associated with bigger bonuses and the boardroom contains no women. Somebody get the personality questionnaires before this gets out of hand.

Perhaps there is a female director trapped somewhere inside a multiple-choice assessment. Strongly agree: I enjoy developing others. Neither agree nor disagree: I respond positively to change. Strongly disagree: I enjoy being directed towards the Senior Women’s Forum while ten blokes keep the fucking board seats.

There may be a magnificent evidence base somewhere explaining how psychometric testing fixes the structure described in Cepac’s own Gender Pay Gap Report. The report does not trouble itself with that detail. It simply places testing among the proposed measures, leaving the reader to imagine a personality inventory marching into the boardroom with a crowbar.

Eight Women And A Leadership Pipeline

Cepac says it introduced a 12-month Leadership Programme in 2025 involving men and women, with eight women participating across the group and also benefiting from mentoring or executive coaching. Excellent. That is precisely the sort of pipeline capable of changing an organisation over time. Or the type of rhetoric you produce when your Gender Pay Report is fucking minging.

The company also records women entering senior sales-management positions and senior health, safety and quality roles. Fine. Keep watching the pipeline, because a company that spends this much language describing the development of female leadership should eventually produce female leaders at the level where statutory authority actually resides.

Not just programme participants, forum members, mentees or women appearing in photographs beneath articles about progress. Directors. The destination of a leadership pipeline is supposed to be leadership, not another fucking pipeline.

That makes future Companies House filings rather more interesting than the next diversity brochure. Leadership programmes are promises written on PowerPoint. Board appointments are the point where somebody eventually has to cash the cheque.

Perhaps Disability Wasn’t The Whole Fucking Story

The Cepac gender pay gap also lands inside a much uglier existing picture. The Cepac Files exists because a disabled candidate was heading towards a promised job interview, disability-related information entered the recruitment chain and the interview disappeared. What followed was not a clean examination of those underlying discrimination allegations on their merits, but years of lawyers, conduct arguments, legal aggression, curated collections of communications, blogs and X posts, followed eventually by the strike-out of the claim after proceedings had been dragged deep into conduct territory encouraged by a dirty tribunal.

Cepac and its disability bullies managed to turn a recruitment discrimination case into an industrial-scale examination of the disabled claimant’s reaction to being fucked around. Now another drawer in the company’s equality cabinet is open, and its own figures are sitting inside.

The workforce is 86% male. Women account for just 14%. Their greatest proportional representation is in the lowest-paid quarter. Mean hourly pay is 10.7% behind men, mean bonus pay is 33.4% behind, men dominate the management positions carrying the larger bonus opportunities and the statutory board remains entirely male.

Perhaps the discrimination at Cepac is not limited to people with disabilities after all. Perhaps there is something broader worth looking at inside a company that has reached 2026 with an all-male board while producing increasingly elaborate documentation about how seriously it takes opportunities for women.

The Cepac Files did not manufacture those numbers. Cepac did. Its own report put them in columns, supplied the percentages and explained that male dominance within management contributes to the bonus picture. All we had to do was read the fucking thing.

The Spreadsheet Doesn’t Give A Fuck About The Brochure

That is the enduring problem with corporate virtue. Eventually somebody publishes data. You can decorate websites with people, planet, inclusion, values and photographs of smiling employees beside expensive machinery, then establish forums, commission programmes, appoint champions and distribute trophies until the office kitchen runs out of wall space.

The spreadsheet remains profoundly unmoved. It records 86% male, 14% female, a 10.7% mean hourly gender pay gap, a 33.4% mean bonus gap and 21.5% female representation in the lowest pay quartile. Then Companies House walks through the door carrying an all-male board.

Maybe the leadership programme changes that picture. Maybe the eight women move upwards, the management balance shifts and somebody eventually notices that a Senior Women’s Forum operating beneath an entirely male statutory board has the flavour of a lifeboat committee being chaired from the fucking iceberg.

Until then, Cepac can keep producing the brochures, forums, programmes, champions, psychometric tests and commemorative vegetables. Cepac’s legal team found out about my anxiety disorder and started applying for hearings to be public.

So here are your fucking public hearings. Enjoy.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

The Cepac Files : Cepac Gender Pay Gap – Women Get A Forum, Men Keep The Boardroom