Who’s Who: 1st Black Female CEO of Global Bio Database Aims For Inclusivity

Erica Lee, CEO of Marquis Who’s Who at a recent event.

After delivering her third child at 5:25 a.m. on March 18, 2020, by 8 a.m., Erica Lee, then chief operating officer of Marquis Who’s Who, was on the phone with her remote team asking how they were doing with her newly devised COVID plan to work from home.

“I had her, she’s fine, now let’s get you working,” she says she told her team.

Lee is pretty certain that her strategic determination and intentional planning around COVID restrictions while she was enduring childbirth is what secured her the CEO spot when she returned to work after maternity leave.

“Erica Lee is pretty certain that her strategic determination and intentional planning is what secured her the CEO spot at @marquiswhoswho when she returned to work after #maternityleave. #workingmother ”

That is because when she first learned of the coronavirus spreading in China in December 2019, she was pregnant, concerned about it coming to the U.S., and eager to prepare the company as well as herself for quarantining and safety. So she bought and wore PPE to the office, strategized on remote work plans and made sure everyone was able to work from home effectively, beginning in early 2020.

“In this role of CEO, I feel the weight of that; you know the decisions you are making are affecting everyone,” Lee says.

Now as the first female CEO of the 120-year-old global biographical database, she and her team of about 135 staffers plus contractors are set to deliver inclusive, diverse, accurate and deserving biographies of contemporary C-level executives, physicians, financiers, political figures, academics, thought leaders and world leaders across the U.S. and the world.

Because Lee has a lifetime of knowing what’s what.

Born in Queens, NY, the daughter of a Jamaican mother and a Chinese father, Lee says her multi-cultural upbringing afforded her a way to think about the connections of people across the globe and across identities.

“Erika Lee, CEO of @Marquiswhoswho, says her multi-cultural upbringing afforded her a way to think about the connections of people across the globe and across identities. #inclusivity”

As an undergraduate student at Yale University in the late 1990s studying anthropology (after switching from pre-med), she and her friends launched a series of startups, including iMedia, and GradExchange, a web-based career portal for graduate students.

“Dot com businesses were really hot,” Lee says, “and we took that opportunity to seize the day. It was fantastic on the job learning,” she says. “We knew this would be the future.”

Admitting that while going to school full-time and working, “I was not really sleeping,” she and her friends purchased a building in New Haven, Conn., and created a collaborative pre-WeWork shared space concept far ahead of its time.

After taking a year off school to work on her projects, including being a facilitator traveling around the country for OS Earth, a game based on Buckminster Fuller’s book, Spaceship Earth, Lee graduated from Yale in 2002 and returned home to New York.

Her parents thought her startup experience was “all fun and games, and now it was time to figure it out and take the MCAT or the LSAT,” Lee says. “I thought I must take this trajectory for graduate school because it’s the logical next step,” she says.

But she went another route. Her first job was for the company that would become Worldwide Branding, part of the Who’s Who empire, and that led her to work for Marquis, “the company that documented executive profiles and incredible and important lives starting in 1898,” she says.

That fit well with her anthropology training, as she was striving to understand the basic questions of “Where did you come from, where have you been, how are we interconnected and how are we inspiring each other?”

Acknowledging the lack of diversity in typical collections of biographies, Lee is working with Star Jones, executive editor of the Marquis Maker’s list, that is spotlighting influential LGBTQ leaders and African Americans of Change, Women Luminaries plus other under-represented leaders in communities. It builds on a tradition begun in 1958, when the company launched Who’s Who Of American Women. To date, there are more than 1.6 million listees.  

“CEO Erika Lee is working with @StarJonesESQ , executive editor of @Marquiswhoswho Maker’s list that is spotlighting influential LGBTQ leaders and African Americans of Change. #blackhistory #lgbtqhistory”

“You have to be someone who is committed to your work for a period of time so you can see your evolution over the years,” says Lee, of the criterion of selection committees.

Other listings at different historical sources are historically not as inclusive. The absences—and erasure—of women’s lives from biographical collections and data echoes a historic, chronic and ongoing failure to chronicle history.

“The absences—and erasure—of women’s lives from biographical collections and data echoes a historic, chronic and ongoing failure to chronicle history. #womendonews #womenleaders”

Dr. Francesca Tripodi Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science, reveals to NPR in her study, “Ms. Categorized: Gender, Notability And Inequality on Wikipedia, that “when women go missing from Wikipedia, that absence reverberates throughout the 21st century in pretty much any way we go to learn about something. So discrediting the significance of women subjects holds really wide implications,” she said, speaking on NPR.

“A lot of people know that less than 19% of biographies on English language Wikipedia are about women, but few people understand the extra hurdles that editors have to jump through in order to get these pages to stick,” Tripodi tells NPR. “And what my research finds is that for the last three years, articles about women rose, like, 16% to about 18%. And during that time period, the percentage of articles for deletion about women were always over 25%. Women who meet Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion are just more likely to be considered non-notable and less worthy for inclusion than men.”

The WikiProject Women project was founded to “discuss and collaborate on coverage of women's content across Wikipedia. This project addresses the under-representation of content on Wikipedia about women (both real and fictional) and covering women's perspectives. Only 17% of Wikipedia biographies are about women,” according to the site.

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But Lee is making sure Marquis is diverse and inclusive across gender, identity, geography, industry, age, ideology and more. The committees investigating nominations for listings do due diligence.

“Erika Lee, CEO of @Marquiswhoswho is making sure Marquis is #diverse and inclusive across gender, identity, geography, industry, age, ideology and more. #womenshistory”

“They are looking for people with published works and have works published about them, folks who are looking to move the needle and be transformational,” Lee says. As for the leaders who are included, Lee says, “They are trusting you with their stories and I feel empowered every day that I am here.”

Those who are listed—both alive and deceased—are periodically reviewed to be certain their legacies remain authentic and unblemished. It is not often, but at times, individuals are removed from the listings. “Every biography is under review,” she says.  

As a Black female CEO, Lee is a rarity. Two Black female CEOs on the 2021 Fortune 500 list are Thasunda Brown Duckett of TIAA and Rosalind Brewer of Walgreens Boot Alliance.

“The report’s data also highlighted that Black Americans account for just 5% of manager positions in the 80 Fortune 500 companies for which data were available, compared to a 13% share of the broader U.S. population (according to U.S. Census data). Hispanics and Latinos held just 6% of manager positions against an 18.4% share of the population,” Essence reports. 

And while her company and her work is about honoring the value of life’s work, Lee pursues the values she honors in a wealth of volunteer positions. She is the former Advisory Board Chairperson of Birthright AFRICA and now serves as an ambassador for the organization, as she discovered through her mother’s DNA data search that she is part Nigerian and Ghanaian.

“When I go back to my lineage and my heritage, it all makes it possible for me to sit here today,” says Lee, who is a Board Member of Harbor Childcare and Early Learning Center and member of the Collective of Concerned Black Professionals. In 2019, she received a Community Mainstreaming Associates award for her advocacy and support of organizations providing resources for adults with special needs and developmental disabilities. 

Living in New York with her husband, David, and three children, ages 9, 6, and 16 months, Lee acknowledges her own life story is noteworthy.

“I met my husband when he was in first grade and I was in kindergarten,” Lee says. “His twin sister was my friend. We reconnected 24 years later and have been married nearly 11 years,” says Lee.

 As the CEO of a growing legacy company, and one who grew her resume working with startups while still in college, Lee says the advice she offers is clear.

“I think you have to start and you have to get started. You can get stuck in theory and what if this and what if that. Get moving, otherwise it will just be a dream deferred.”

“ As the CEO of a growing legacy company, and one who grew her resume working with startups while still in college, Erika Lee says the advice she offers is clear: “Get moving, otherwise it will just be a dream deferred.” #careeradvice #success”

She adds, “Cosmically, if it is supposed to happen it will, but it won’t if you don’t get started.”