[1][3] When her contract was not renewed, Mees stayed in New York and worked as an independent consultant on European affairs.

[6] As a firm advocate of female ambition and a promoter of more women in the supervisory and executive boards of big companies, Mees has been described as a "power feminist".

[8] She has written for publications such as Foreign Policy[9] and for Project Syndicate In September 2015 she was a guest columnist for de Volkskrant,[10] and in 2016 began a biweekly column for that same paper.

[3] In July 2013, Mees was arrested in New York on charges of stalking her former lover, the chief economist of Citigroup, Willem Buiter.

[17] In August 2012, Mees completed a doctoral thesis at the Erasmus School of Economics, in which she argued that the primary cause of the 2008 global financial crisis was the flourishing economy in China and resulting savings and government investments by the Chinese.