NATEA Women’s Summit highlights leadership, work-life 'mix' for Taiwanese women

北美台灣工程師協會女性科技論壇強調台灣女性的領導力、工作與生活的“混合”

Online event features speakers with experience in American tech companies, leadership roles


TAIPEI (Taiwan) — The North America Taiwanese Engineering and Science Association (NATEA) held its second annual Women’s Summit on Saturday morning (March 26), during which speakers shared leadership tips for women and personal experiences in paving a meaningful path in their lives.

Speakers and panelists included former Google and Microsoft engineering leader Yumay Chang (張郁梅), Google Cloud technical leader and manager Janet Kuo, Meta AI data science tech lead manager Justine Kao, New England Innovation Academy founding member Jossy Lee (李楓真), KLA Corporation product marketing manager Karis Lee, and former Amazon senior product manager Jiali.

In a keynote speech, Chang shared that she had made the deliberate decision to leave the field of technology “because I realized that writing code is awesome, but that alone is not going to make or break the company.” She said she spent the next part of her career exploring various “operating roles” in companies because she was interested to learn what people cared about.

One piece of advice she gave the audience was that achieving financial freedom means being able to choose to leave jobs — as well as relationships and marriages. She said this is why it is also important to invest.

Chang said that as a child growing up in Taiwan, she lived with a sense of non-conformity and refused to follow rules that did not make sense to her. This helped her avoid the trap of “playing it too safe,” which she said prevents one from becoming a leader.

She added that to excel at work means to produce results rather than working extra hours, stressing the importance of knowing when to say no. “I think a lot of times Asians tend to have trouble setting boundaries, tend to have trouble saying no. I suffered that in my younger days.”

Saying no is also about preserving one’s own energy for better productivity and health as well as about respect, according to Chang. If someone allows others to cross over the boundary of their personal time, it signals that “my time is not worth anything.”

When asked about workplace biases and how she navigated her career as an Asian woman, Chang said, “I don’t really think about myself as an Asian female… What I do think about is what are the ways that I can contribute.” However, she recalled observing subtle biases at her workplace in the U.S., such as a manager who would speak differently to women, or Asians being pigeonholed as people who do a lot of work but lack strategy and leadership potential.

Following Chang’s keynote speech, Kuo and Kao discussed the journeys that led them to their current leadership roles at Google and Meta as well as the principles they follow as managers. They highlighted the importance of communicating clearly, having confidence, and time management when taking on the additional responsibilities that come with being managers.

Jossy Lee, Karis Lee, and Jiali also talked about building a life outside of work and tips on managing different aspects of life. Jossy Lee said that instead of calling it a work-life “balance,” she prefers viewing the concept as a “mix” of various parts of life so that the focus is not so much on precariously “balancing” things and as being immersed in the moment.