Carolee Lee is an innovator, entrepreneur and thought leader dedicated to improving women’s health and wellbeing, and their opportunities to succeed. She was founder and CEO of Carolee Designs, one of the world’s leading accessories brands. In 2008, she founded Access Circles, a global, by-invitation network committed to bringing women access to leaders, resources and experiences that can help transform their lives.
In 2018, Carolee launched Women’s Health Access Matters (WHAM!), a nonprofit organization to improve the health and wellbeing of women by accelerating attention to sex and gender in medical research, to better understand health conditions that occur exclusively or predominately in women in order to develop solutions that optimize women’s health. Carolee has forged a research partnership with the RAND Corporation to highlight the economic costs, benefits and social impacts of health research that focuses on women and is using that data is being to erase the gender research gap and accelerate women’s health around the world.
Carolee is also a mentor and leader in business, philanthropic and educational organizations. She is a past Chair and Foundation Board Chair of the Committee of 200, a community of the most successful women in business, and has served as director on the board of DSW, Inc., a leading shoe retailer. Carolee is a founding board member of The Breast Cancer Research Foundation, where she has served since 1986. She currently sits on the Women’s Leadership Board at The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
