Women in Tech: How BCG’s Mei Lee Rose Up in the Tech Industry

Part of the executive team at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) is Mei Lee, Partner and Associate Director, whose expertise lies in digital commerce and marketing topics. Prior to joining BCG, Mei was Lazada’s Senior Vice President of Marketing for almost 4 years. She is honoured as one of Asia's Top 50 Women Leaders by CMO Asia and named as one of 50 Most Influential Global Digital Marketing Leaders by World Marketing Congress.

While Mei now has 20 years of experience in digital marketing, data insights, e-commerce, video advertising, and consumer marketing across the United States and APAC, it was a long journey to get to where she is now. Her story started in the United States, as an Asian-American woman during a time when the digital and tech field was still budding.

Rather than make the deliberate decision to go into the tech industry, Mei says that she happened to be in the right place at the right time and made the right bet at the time. Her first job then organically led her to a 20-year long career in digital and tech spanning across Los Angeles, New York City, and now Singapore.

Growing alongside the tech industry

Graduating from the University of Oregon in 2003, Mei was trained academically in traditional marketing, which involved consumer research and branding. By the time she graduated from college, the digital wave had started in the United States and her first job was working at a foreign currency exchange company as an Internet Marketing Specialist, running online media to get investors to open accounts to trade currencies.

A few years down the road, she then embarked on her most technical job: working for the Walt Disney Company as a Search Engineering Manager responsible for the search algorithm of Disney.com globally. This was where she faced her biggest career challenge. Mei was new to engineering and her role scope. The digital and tech field at that time was nascent, where “everyone was doing everything for the first time” and she did not have a mentor until she was about to leave the company. Additionally, she was a young Asian-American woman working in a male-dominated environment.

“This chapter of my career gave me some of my lowest points in life, but it also gave me my most treasured lessons,” Mei shares. It took her 9 months to overcome her challenges through reading countless business, self-help, and leadership books. She also says that she was fortunate to have the guidance of her colleague who was able to point out her blind spots and played a key role in her transformation into a tech leader.

How far the tech industry has come

The digital and tech industry today is quite different from how it was when Mei first stepped into it more than a decade ago. Back then, there were only Google, Yahoo, and AOL, in comparison to the whole fleet of social media sites available to digital marketers and consumers in the present day. Now, more than ever, there is a boom in digital marketing and with it, a rise in available tech jobs and an increasing demand for tech talent.

When asked about how jobs will change in the future, Mei says that we are lucky to be working in APAC, especially in Southeast Asia, right now. The region is going through massive digital transformation and innovation, which will open up new career pathways and opportunities for everyone. Jobs will be more borderless and automated in the future. Yet, the skills that will never expire are communications, strategic thinking, and leadership expertise.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, digital markets have also gone through an acceleration. There was also a big wave of resignation in the tech industry, as part of the Great Resignation, where people took a step back to ask themselves the hard questions and realised they wanted to do something different. Not only is the digital field changing, but the people working in it and their priorities are changing as well.

Levelling the playing field between genders

During the first 10 years of Mei’s career, her biggest challenge was proving that she was analytical and technical enough. In the last 10 years of her career, her biggest challenge was proving that she has “gravitas” like her male counterparts to handle senior level roles, which itself is a gender bias from employers and recruiters.

Singapore has one of the highest proportions of women in the tech workforce globally. In a report published by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) in 2020, women comprise of 41% of our tech workforce, in contrast with the global average of 28%. However, according to the 2021 Job Report released by JobStreet, in the tech industry, 90% of the candidates shortlisted or hired for senior positions are male.

Mei shares that she is very aware of how other people, especially male counterparts, may perceive her personal obligations such as looking after her family and children. She sometimes feels like men have the judgement that she cannot work as hard, or is being “held back” because of her “family” responsibilities. To counter this, she tends to not share as much about her personal situation with certain male counterparts to avoid any potential unnecessary judgement and unfair perception about her.

However, as a society, she believes that we should be moving away from this mindset. Mei emphasises that we need to do more to empower women to pursue more education, higher compensation, less judgement, and better support at home. She also adds that many companies are working tirelessly to achieve this vision, which she finds very encouraging.

Gender bias, inequality, and representation are still very real issues in almost every company globally. Mei admits that she has experienced these issues throughout her career. “I want to focus on what can we do as women to overcome this mentally,” Mei says. “At the end of the day, the world won’t ever be perfect. My advice to every woman who are hustling to build a career, land a promotion, get the dream job is this: Be your authentic self; everyone else is already taken. The journey starts with us. We may not be able to end gender inequality alone or save the world, but we can end a toxic job environment, speak up about unfair treatments, or uplift another woman.”

In fact, Mei thinks the tech sector is one of the better examples of good progress in gender equality. To girls and women out there who are thinking of joining the tech industry, Mei tells them, “The tech industry is ever evolving and needs innovators, thinkers, challengers, and creators. You can be that person. Find your sweet spot and be the best in what you do.”

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Mei Lee was a speaker at the Women in Tech webinar held during the JobStreet x Tech in Asia’s Virtual Career Fair, along with Jessica Danajaya Tremel from theAsianParent, and Aditi Toshniwal from TikTok.