International Women's Day Celebration - Count Her In Invest in Women. Accelerate Progress.

Ellie is Co-Chair of WiPA Scotland and passionate about equitable access to opportunities for women at all stages of their policy and public affairs careers. In her role at Marie Curie, Ellie leads the charity’s Scottish health inequalities and inequities portfolio recently completing research on gender experiences at end of life, which has been accepted to the 2024 European Association of Palliative Care World Research Congress.

Julie is Chair of the Institute of Directors (IoD) in Scotland, and Chair of the University of Aberdeen as well as being an Advisory Board member for the Scottish Business Network and Founders4Schools. She has previously held non-executive roles with George Watson's College, the Royal Company of Merchants of the City of Edinburgh among others and spent 3 years as Chair of an award winning retail tech start-up and is a member of SVc2UK. Julie is the Scotland lead for Women on Boards UK

Julie is both founder and CEO of Broadreach, providing specialist leadership consulting services to global blue-chip companies. Julie works extensively as a Board Advisor with FTSE 100 companies in the UK . She has held Retail Director roles with Liberty of London and Punch Taverns and was Executive Partner at IBM with responsibility for retail across EMEA and the US. She began her corporate career with Tesco, leaving her role as a senior executive to compete in the Round the World Yacht race.

Lesley Brydon is the founder and managing director of Clark, a company specialising in PR, graphic design, and social media, with clients in the B2B, technology, public sector and food and drink sectors.

Lesley founded Clark in 2012, and until early 2013 chaired the Edinburgh branch of the Institute of Directors. She now sits on the Institute of Directors advisory committee for Scotland.

In her earlier career, Lesley worked for FMS Public Relations and Citigate SMARTS before becoming the international vice-president for Weber Shandwick, a role she held between 2000 and 2012. During this time, she also chaired the PRCA in Scotland for four years.

In October 2020, Lesley appeared on a Leaders Council of Great Britain & Northern Ireland podcast, discussing the importance of leadership and the impact it has had on her career to date.

Managing Director, Muckle Media

A reputation and communications specialist, Nathalie Agnew launched Muckle Media in 2012 following a long career supporting some of the world’s biggest brands for London agencies. A former Fleishman-Hillard and Porter Novelli senior international PR advisor, Nathalie has significant experience across many sectors and has led her team at Muckle Media Group to win numerous awards in recent years, the most notable being the CIPR Scotland PRide Outstanding PR Consultancy award in 2023 and the PRCA DARE Large Agency of the Year in 2021. Nathalie also led the agency to become the first B-Corp PR agency in Scotland. Nathalie is a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered institute of Public Relations (CIPR) and a member of the PRCA and the Marketing Society. Nathalie chairs the Institute of Directors Edinburgh and Lothians branch.

Zahra is CEO of Winning Scotland, a charity which works with partners to build confidence and resilience in children and young people. She is a Board Member at community justice organisation Sacro and volunteers with Changing the Chemistry, a charity which seeks to improve diversity on boards. Prior to joining Winning Scotland, she built and sold her own retail business, before moving to the statutory and third sectors working in social enterprise, with Scottish Government, and at Samtaler a social value creation agency.