The Ecology of Exclusion: How Anglo‐Male Cultural Logics Reproduce Unequal Leadership Progression for Ethnically Diverse Women

Ethnically diverse women remain underrepresented in senior and executive leadership despite many having already demonstrated leadership capability in managerial roles. This study examines how leadership legitimacy is reproduced in ways that constrain their progression from management into senior and executive leadership in corporate Australia. Drawing on 43 semistructured interviews with ethnically diverse women in leadership (EDWIL), organizational representatives, and industry stakeholders across two ASX200 organizations, we use an interpretivist, abductive qualitative design informed by patriarchy, Critical Whiteness, intersectionality, and Ecological Systems Theory. We identify a competence–legitimacy discontinuity at the management‐to‐senior‐leadership threshold: demonstrated capability can be organizationally recognized and utilized without being converted into recognition as legitimate for greater leadership authority. We further theorize relational conferral as the process through which influential organizational actors convert—or fail to convert—recognized competence into endorsement and progression opportunity. Anglo‐male Cultural Logic s explain how these legitimacy judgments are culturally organized through intersecting gendered and racialized norms. Finally, we conceptualize an Ecology of Exclusion , represented through the Eco‐EDWIL model, showing how leadership composition, organizational standards, relational conferral, individual evaluation and adaptation, and progression outcomes become recursively connected. The study thereby reframes exclusion as differential progression within leadership hierarchies rather than exclusion from leadership itself.