Tina Lee grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown and has become one of the youngest members of the Board of Trustees of Mills College, a women’s college in Oakland. Having had held roles in both start-ups and large corporations, Tina’s professional background includes industry experience in management consulting, staffing and recruiting, and publishing. In 2003, Tina was instrumental in launching Hyphen Magazine, a successful Asian American focused art and culture magazine. She also played a key role in developing the Mentorship Program at the Women’s Technology Cluster, the nation’s first technology and biotech industry business incubator specifically targeted to women entrepreneurs. While working as a management consultant at Accenture, Tina helped Fortune 100 clients in the telecommunications and high-tech industries implement technology solutions and re-engineer business processes to enhance performance. As a recruiting manager and account executive at Robert Half International, Tina helped build a new permanent placement division focused on Information Technology staffing in the East Bay Metropolitan Area. Tina is currently launching her first entrepreneurial endeavor – a civic minded retail clothing chain aimed at politically and socially engaged urban professional women.

In addition, Tina is a published author and an active community member. She holds a B.A. in Political, Legal and Economic Analysis with an emphasis in Economics and an MBA from Mills College, where she currently serves on the Board of Trustees. Tina is also a board member of Good Ol’ Girls, a political, professional, and social network for progressive women in politics, government, non-profit, law, technology, the arts, and business.

About the topic:
With so many women obtaining college degrees and pursuing professional careers in the past 40 years, you’d assume gender equity would no longer be an in issue in the 21st century. Sadly, this is not the case.

While women now hold 51% of managerial positions, they represent only 16% of Fortune 1000 corporate officers, 10% of power positions such as CEO and COO, and 5% of those holding top earning jobs. In government, women represent only 15% of the 535 seats in Congress and 14% of the 100 seats in the Senate. But of those women at the top, 33% of female Fortune 1000 board members are graduates of women’s colleges, as are 36% of the highest-paid female officers at those companies, and 20% of Congresswomen, including our very own Barbara Lee and Nancy Pelosi. Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State, graduated from a women’s college, as did Hillary Clinton, our first viable female presidential candidate.

With women now comprising more than 55% of undergraduate enrollment across the country and only 2% of those being enrolled in women’s colleges, why are alumnae of single-sex colleges so well represented among our nation’s top leadership ranks?

In this Thursday Morning Dialogue, we will discover why there is still a compelling case for women’s colleges in the 21st century and how they can to propel the next generation of women forward.