I have a confession.

For years, I sat in leadership meetings where my colleagues debated theories about what held Black women back in professional environments. I listened to the frameworks, the interventions, the well-intentioned analysis. And the whole time, I was sitting there as the actual subject of the research, raising two kids as a divorced single mother, struggling to find childcare during my comprehensive exams, navigating the same systems everyone else was discussing as though they were an abstraction.

The disconnect was obvious. And it is what drove me, for over two decades, to build something different: research grounded in the lived realities of Black women, not in theories about us.

In 2010, my doctoral dissertation became the first formal documentation of work I had been conducting for years, a quantitative study of 348 Black women professionals, examining what actually drives advancement, opportunity, and success. Not what we assume drives it. What the data shows.

Then, fifteen years later, I returned to that same professional population and asked again. The 2025 follow-up extended the population to include both organizational and entrepreneurial leaders, and brought the combined sample across both studies to over 600 Black women. The findings deepened what 2010 revealed. The picture that emerged from both studies is the foundation of my book, Revolutionary Leadership: A Power Playbook for Black Women, and it is the foundation of this series.

What the research is — and is not

Twenty years. Two studies. Over 600 Black women across both. Same population studied across fifteen years to see what the patterns do over time. The 2010 study was 348 Black women professionals across eight organizations. The 2025 follow-up extended into entrepreneurship and expanded the sample.

This is not a survey. It is not anecdote. It is not a hot take on what Black women in leadership ‘need.’ It is a quantitative longitudinal study with regression analyses, controlled variables, statistical significance testing, and the kind of methodological rigor that the field has been demanding for decades and rarely funding.

And the findings contradicted the dominant career advice. Not all of it. But enough of it that I had to look at the regression tables more than once before I believed them. This is what the next four issues will walk through.

What is coming over the next four Mondays

Issue 2 — The Visibility Paradox. The data on external visibility versus internal positioning. Why one of the most common pieces of career advice does not predict the outcome you are looking for.

Issue 3 — The Relationship Ecosystem. What the data says about mentors, sponsors, peers, and the architecture of relationships that actually move careers forward. Why the single-mentor model collapses under scrutiny.

Issue 4 — Care Is Not What Holds Us Back. The data on caregiving and leadership. The finding that reframes a question the field has been asking wrong for forty years.

Issue 5 — We Are Not Defined by How Long We Can Endure. The closing finding on sustainability and what the leaders who held over decades actually did differently.

What this is — and is not

I want to be clear about something before we go any further.

This research is not an argument that Black women need better strategies to navigate broken systems. The findings reveal something about the systems themselves: they are not designed for the leadership Black women have actually been doing. That is a systems-design finding, not a personal-development finding.

What the research also reveals is that Black women have been doing something remarkable in response to those conditions. We have been building more effective leadership models — relational, community-anchored, integrated rather than fragmented. The data shows this consistently across both studies.

That is what I call Revolutionary Leadership. And it has been hiding in plain sight.

Over the next four issues, we will go deeper into the specific findings. Each one will challenge something you have been told. Each one will offer a different framework for what to do with the data you are now holding.

Issue 2 lands Tuesday, June 30. Visibility — and what twenty years of data says about the advice we have been given.