Black Women Academic Nurse Leaders in the United States Defining Leadership Success on Their Own Terms

ABSTRACT

Black women remain markedly underrepresented in senior academic nursing leadership positions despite credential parity with peers. Scholarship has documented the barriers that produce this underrepresentation but has under‐examined how Black women define leadership success when given the epistemic authority to define it. This secondary qualitative analysis examined interview transcripts from 14 senior Black women academic nurse leaders using Black feminist analytic principles and an iterative four‐domain coding apparatus. Five thematic findings were developed. Participants' self‐defined success diverged systematically from institutional metrics and formed along dimensions recurring across the dataset, with relational success the most stable definition across the dataset and legacy the dominant late‐career frame. A consolation prize cycle, in which the credentials institutions demanded produced lesser positions rather than the advancement promised, structured institutions' failure to recognize the participants' leadership. Institutional context emerged as a condition of sustained leadership rather than a backdrop to it. Leaders who had advanced without consistent early sponsorship generated three original theoretical concepts, offered as contributions to leadership scholarship. The findings hold direct implications for how academic nursing institutions evaluate, recognize, and reward leadership, contributing a Black feminist empirical case to the broader research assessment reform movement.