The Authenticity Trap

Sonia Brown MBE
1 hour ago
6 min read

**Why "Just Be Yourself" Leadership Advice Fails Black Women and What Real Impact Looks Like Instead.**

For senior leaders 55+, especially those with a few good years of runway left, the data is unambiguous and it is global.

The numbers do not lie.

In the United States hundreds of thousands of women of colour, particularly Black women, have been pushed out of the workforce in recent years through federal cuts, DEI rollbacks, AI-driven restructuring and contractions in the sectors where they were concentrated (public service, education, HR, non-profits).

Estimates centre on 300,000+ Black women losing jobs or exiting the labour force in key 2025 windows alone, with unemployment rates climbing sharply, often into the 7%+ range, while other groups saw gains or milder losses. College-educated Black women were hit especially hard.

Economists describe this as structural, not a blip, with downstream costs to GDP and the talent pipeline.

The UK fares no better because the picture is strikingly similar. Black leaders account for only 3.5% of top UK organisations and just 1.5% of the UK's 3.7 million business leaders come from a Black or minority ethnic background. On FTSE 100 boards, none of the small number of female chief executives are Black women.

A 2025 survey of the UK workforce found that nearly 8 in 10 Black women (79%) say racial or ethnic bias is a barrier to reaching leadership and in tech specifically, Black women make up just 0.7% of the workforce despite being heavily represented in entry-level recruitment marketing. Civil Service data shows ethnic minority representation in the Senior Civil Service is still missing the government's own targets.

Is this an isolated trend?

Across Canada, the Caribbean and continental Africa, similar patterns repeat wherever Black women move through majority-white or majority-male institutions. Strong entry-level representation, a "leaky pipeline" at every promotion gate and disproportionate attrition once bias, tokenism or restructuring hits. Diaspora leaders often carry an added layer, navigating authenticity expectations shaped by multiple cultural contexts (home country, host country and workplace norms that assume neither), which compounds the double bind.

What Scholars Have Been Telling Us All Along

Black academics and researchers have documented the deeper pattern this moment exposes and their work reframes "authentic leadership" away from the standard. The narrative is often a relative, majority-normed model of "know thyself and be true" moving towards something more relational, intersectional and power-aware.

Authenticity is not equally available or equally rewarded.

Scholars like Faith Wambura Ngunjiri and Kathy-Ann C. Hernandez, alongside researchers such as Natasha Turman, argue that the authentic leadership literature routinely ignores context.

For Black and women of colour, self-awareness and relational transparency collide with racialised and gendered stereotypes such as the "angry Black woman" trope, persumed incompetence, hypervisibility paired with invisibility. Being fully authentic can carry real professional risk. Code-switching and strategic self-presentation become survival tools, not failures of authenticity in the workplace.

Research on Black women faculty and leaders consistently documents dehumanisation, surveillance, erasure, excess emotional labour and measurable health costs from navigating predominantly white institutions. Intersectional devaluation and "weathering" within the workplace is subtle but real.

Weathering is important because it explains why the cumulative effect of code-switching, hypervisibility, microaggressions and constantly proving competence is not just emotionally demanding, it has a documented physical burden over a career. It is part of why researchers push back on framing Black women's workplace struggles as purely about "resilience" or "grit" because the body is absorbing a structural cost, not just a psychological one.

Organisational psychologist Kecia M. Thomas's "pet to threat" framework studies the workplace experiences of Black and women of colour, particularly in predominantly white institutions and captures the shift from ‘celebrated-but-exploited’ to ‘’perceived-as-a-threat’.

Stage 1: "Pet"

Early in her tenure or at junior levels, a Black woman is often welcomed, even celebrated. She might be treated as a kind of mascot or "diversity showcase". Praised for her presence, held up as proof of the company’s inclusiveness, given attention and encouragement.

But this welcome often comes with an undertone. She is expected to be non-threatening, agreeable and grateful for the opportunity. The "pet" role can feel like support, but it is frequently conditional and somewhat demeaning. She must know her place. She is valued for optics or affirmation and is not yet seen as a serious contender for power.

Stage 2: "Threat"

As this woman gains seniority, expertise, confidence or starts advocating for herself or others, the dynamic flips. The same qualities that once made her seem like a rising star, assertiveness, ambition, competence get reinterpreted as aggressive, difficult or intimidating. She stops being celebrated and starts being overly scrutinised, excluded or undermined. This is often when stereotypes like the "angry Black woman" get activated and when career stalling, exclusion from key decisions or even pushed out tends to happen.

The framework is powerful because it shows that the problem is not really about the individual woman's behaviour because she may not have changed much between the two stages. What has really changes is how the organisation perceives and responds to her growing power and visibility.

It reframes the "authenticity" backlash as a structural pattern rather than a personal failing, which is exactly why it shows up in that leadership. This explains why being your full, competent self can become more professionally risky, not less, the more successful you become.

Concrete Ceilings and Sponsorship Gaps.

Underrepresentation at senior levels persists at low single digits across C-suite and academic leadership in the US, UK and beyond. Barriers include limited access to high-visibility assignments, affinity bias in sponsorship, tokenism and the "Strong Black Woman" depiction, which can sustain a leader through hardship while quietly exhausting her.

UK-focused studies on Black female leaders describe near-identical patterns of marginalisation to their US counterparts, suggesting this is not a US-specific phenomenon but a structural feature of majority-white institutions generally.

Cultural and Intergenerational Friction.

Younger talent is watching what senior leaders do or more importantly do not do, on equity and retention. Leaders 55+ often hold formal power while operating from leadership prototypes forged in a different demographic and cultural era. The result is stalled pipelines, eroded trust and a rising generation questioning whether traditional institutions can deliver real belonging, anywhere in the world.

What Real Impact Actually Requires

Black scholars and practitioners point toward practices that move past tick box exercises and performative statements, wherever in the world an organisation operates:

Redefine authenticity relationally and contextually. Support leaders in practicing wholeness, self-preservation, solidarity, amplification, rather than demanding conformity to majority norms. Transparency looks different when your identity is minoritised.
Sponsorship over mentorship alone. Active advocacy for stretch roles, visibility and succession, especially from senior leaders who do not share the same identity, is repeatedly identified as the decisive lever. Affinity bias has to be deliberately interrupted, not left to goodwill.
Measure what matters, then act on it. Track exits, promotion rates and performance evaluation patterns by race and gender, in every market you operate in. Address the specific mechanisms, biased evaluations, workload overload, lack of psychological safety, instead of generic diversity metrics.
Rebuild after the exits. Many women of colour pushed out are pivoting to entrepreneurship, consulting and community-rooted leadership, in the US, UK and across the diaspora alike. Organisations that want that talent back need credible culture repair, not recycled DEI language.
Build intergenerational bridges. Create structured space for dialogue that surfaces cultural differences without centring deficit narratives. Younger leaders of colour bring different expectations around authenticity, equity and impact. Listening without defensiveness is leadership.
Treat this as an institutional design problem, not an individual resilience test. From performance systems to succession planning, the documented double bind needs structural redesign. Individual grit was never going to substitute for that.

The Question That Matters

For leaders 55+, wherever you sit, London, New York, Lagos, Toronto, your remaining runway is a leverage point. Real impact is measured less by personal authenticity statements and more by whether the systems you shape retain, promote and fully utilise talent that has already paid a high price just to be present.

The research is clear.

The job losses on both sides of the Atlantic make the stakes concrete. The only open question is whether leadership will treat this as data requiring action or as someone else's problem.

If you lead people, this is your call to action.

Like this post if you are done treating authenticity as a personal quirk instead of a structural design problem. Share this with a leader who still thinks authenticity is a personal quirk, not a structural design problem. In addition, if you are a Black or woman of colour reading this, share this post with someone who sponsored you, not just mentored you. Let us make the invisible labour visible.

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