Navigating the margins: institutional regulation of executive leadership pathways for Black women

Black women remain significantly underrepresented in executive leadership roles in higher education despite expanded diversity initiatives and greater representation at lower academic ranks. This study examines how leadership pathways are structured, regulated, and constrained for Black women in senior positions at a public university in the United States. Using a critical phenomenological design informed by intersectionality, critical race theory, and gendered and racialized organization theories, the analysis demonstrates that executive mobility is shaped through mutually reinforcing structural arrangements, interpersonal practices, and experiential negotiations. Participants described stratified advancement pathways, racialized and gendered constructions of leadership legitimacy, exclusion from informal networks, and reliance on informal mentoring and sponsorship as recurring conditions of leadership participation. Rather than conceptualizing inequity as a pipeline deficit or an accumulation of discrete barriers, the findings illuminate how institutional structures, organizational practices, and relational dynamics shape access to leadership, the recognition of authority, and the sustainability of leadership trajectories. By linking lived experience to organizational processes, the study advances a multilevel framework for understanding how racialized and gendered leadership inequality is reproduced across structural, interpersonal, and experiential levels. Although grounded in a single U.S. institutional context, the findings offer a theoretically informed lens that may be analytically transferable to comparable higher education settings.