Leading at the intersection: re-theorising the leadership profiles of black women in senior management in Nigeria’s banking sector

The Nigerian banking sector has seen a marked rise in women’s representation at the senior leadership level, moving from one female bank chief executive in 2019 to nine by 2025, driven largely by Central Bank of Nigeria diversity mandates. Yet numerical gains say little about how these women lead, earn trust, and are perceived once in post. This conceptual paper repositions intersectionality theory, developed around race in white-majority contexts, toward dynamics that matter in a Black-majority, post-colonial setting: ethnicity, religion, attractiveness, and education. Drawing on secondary data, biographical profiles, and published interviews with senior Nigerian women bank executives, the paper develops recurring leadership-trait themes, including institutional stewardship, relational trust, collective mentorship, internally earned credibility, dual local/global credentialing, and a double-edged relationship with appearance, and examines how these intersect to shape perceived trustworthiness. The paper closes with a research agenda for extending management theory to account for these dynamics in African corporate settings.