International Women's Day - Newburytoday celebrates some of the women achieving great things in West Berkshire

Today is International Women’s Day – a day to celebrate all the women and girls across the region.

Share your stories – about yourself, your friend, sister, wife, mother – with us today by commenting below or on our social media pages.

Here we share the stories of some of the women making waves in West Berkshire.

Debbie Jacobs enjoyed a successful career in corporate marketing and PR before taking the plunge and launching her own company last year.

Zest Marketing has allowed Debbie the freedom to embrace a love of creative writing and use it to help other businesses tell their tales.

She offers content creation for websites, blogs, articles and social media and from her base in Newbury is now working with businesses, charities and entrepreneurs up and down the country.

“I have spent 25 years in marketing and PR and have always had a love of writing,” she explains. “I took a career break and gained an MA in Writing for Children which led onto a lectureship at a university in creative writing and English.

“Having returned to the marketing industry, I decided to set up on my own. This gave me the opportunity to use my creativity and writing skills to the maximum alongside my marketing experience to help a whole range of businesses tell their story through engaging content.

“So many businesses out there know they need to create great content but just don’t have the time or right person in place to do this. Zest Marketing continues to grow taking on clients from all industry sectors, some start-ups, some well-established.

“My biggest success has been to do what I love most, writing, not just for pleasure but for my business. Getting out of the 9-5 rat race and leaving an environment where my creativity was stifled was a huge step but taking on five new clients in the first two months and subsequently gaining more clients through recommendation has proved that I am good at what I do and I am making a difference.

“I am now earning more than I did as an employee, have a far better work life balance and have reignited my creative brain – what more could a writer/marketer want?”

As a small child, Lucy Costello loved nothing better than ‘rescuing’ animal waifs and strays, a mission that quickly matured into a fascination for conservation and rewilding.

As CEO at Beale Wildlife Park, she today remains as passionate as ever about a cause that gives her ultimate responsibility for around 160 species in 350 acres of parkland.

Lucy’s route to her current role began with a veterinary nursing qualification before moving on to university to study for a degree in zoology. She went on to become head veterinary nurse of the Equine and Large Animal Hospital at the Royal Veterinary College at Potters Bar and her commercial expertise was further honed as regional manager for a large corporate veterinary group in London.

A career break for two children followed, during which Lucy piled in with her husband on the launch of a digital communications business.

“David Attenborough once famously said that ‘no one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced’ – and that is very much our role at Beale,” she said. “I want our visitors not just to enjoy the animals but to understand the issues and crises that go with them.

“The children who come to our Zoo Club, for example, can appreciate that lemurs face huge habitat and food loss in their natural environments. Conservation is the end goal but education is the vehicle through which we can get there – they are indelibly linked.”

At Beale Park you can still see peacocks wandering around the grounds – as introduced by Gilbert Beale from 1956 when he set out on the charitable journey of opening his Thameside estate to the public. But now they are just a small element of a remarkable zoological collection that ranges from lynx to dwarf crocodiles and from zebras to guanacos.

The past few years of the pandemic have been hard for the park, but Lucy said the public support was overwhelming.

While proud to be a woman leader in the zoo industry, Lucy insists that she has seen no gender-based barrier to her progress.

“As with all working mums, my entire life is a juggling act,” she said. “It’s a choice you make and it has pros and cons but I wouldn’t change it for a moment.”

A Newbury bus operator is hoping to increase its percentage of female employees, despite already bucking the industry trend.

Reading Buses is currently recruiting for bus drivers across the company to be based in Newbury, Reading and Bracknell.

“There’s an opportunity for anyone – particularly female – to apply through our latest recruitment campaign,” said Caroline Anscombe, Reading Buses HR director.

“Many have taken the leap and are loving their job as a result. Overall, 17 per cent of our employees and 14 per cent of our drivers are female.

“This is certainly bucking the trend from the ‘normal’ where our research suggests that female bus drivers make up just eight per cent of the bus industry workforce nationally.”

Reading Buses’ longest-serving woman driver has been with the company for 28-and-a-half years – becoming a mum and a grandma during her time as a bus driver.

While their newest recruit is also female having just passed her test and now route learning, at the other end of the scale, Reading Buses’ longest-serving employee – male or female – is a woman with 47-and-a-half years’ service to her name.

She met her husband at Reading Buses and has had two children during her employment.

Anyone interested in becoming a bus driver can find more information at www.reading-buses.co.uk