Cariño Competence in STEM: Women of Color Leadership as Cultural Intuition Praxis

Abstract

Cariño (care) should be central to equity-centered transformation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) higher education. Yet, relational leadership practices that prioritize culturally grounded care—such as cariño—are often absent in STEM initiatives, leaving unexamined how Women of Color (WOC) enact these practices to advance equity for historically marginalized students. Employing a qualitative methodology grounded in Chicana Feminist Epistemology, in-depth interviews were conducted with five WOC leading a multi-institutional, federally funded STEM initiative. Analysis revealed four interrelated dimensions of what we are calling “Cariño Competence”: (1) relational attunement grounded in moral obligation, (2) protective action when project systems fail students, (3) boundary-setting as care and resistance to extractive labor, and (4) community-sustained resilience through networks of WOC leaders. The findings offer a data-driven theorization of Cariño Competence, capturing how WOC operationalize culturally grounded care as a strategic, protective, and resistive praxis. By centering students as the moral and epistemic anchor of leadership decisions, this study demonstrates how relational, culturally sustaining practices can humanize bureaucratic systems, buffer harm, and advance systemic transformation in STEM higher education. These insights contribute to scholarship on culturally responsive leadership and provide a practical framework for advancing equity, inclusion, and empowerment in higher education contexts.

1. Introduction

Equity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) within higher education is often framed in terms of access, representation, and policy reform (Bensimon, 2018). However, policies alone do not enact equity. Institutions may formally commit to equity while simultaneously maintaining practices and norms that reproduce racial hierarchies, requiring leaders to translate abstract principles into daily action (McGee, 2020; Ray, 2019). In practice, equity work is not only structural, but also relational, involving strategic navigation, advocacy, and sustained engagement.

Women of Color (WOC)1 leaders are central to advancing equity in higher education. They mentor students navigating exclusionary climates (Nkrumah & Scott, 2022), challenge institutional barriers (Choi, 2024), and act as institutional agents for historically marginalized communities (Bensimon et al., 2019). At the same time, they are often tasked with disproportionate responsibility for diversity and equity efforts—mentoring students, serving on committees, and responding to campus equity concerns—forms of labor that institutions rely upon, but rarely reward (Woods et al., 2024). This inequitable labor distribution, described as cultural taxation or emotional labor, highlights the racialized and gendered expectation embedded in academic work (Chen & Lawless, 2025; Ray, 2019; Ueda et al., 2024). While research has documented these structural challenges, less is known about how WOC leaders strategically navigate and transform these conditions while sustaining themselves and their communities.

Scholarship on culturally responsive leadership emphasizes that equity-oriented leadership is relational, historically situated, and shaped by leaders’ social positioning rather than technical skill (Khalifa et al., 2016). As Khalifa et al. (2016) and Yosso and Hanchett Hanson (2026) argue, leaders draw on cultural assets, lived experience and cultural knowledge to mentor students, advocate for equitable policies, and build supportive networks. Racialized organizational theory further demonstrates how institutions embed inequity in policies and routines, often normalizing whiteness as the standard for leadership, expertise, and belonging (Ray, 2019). Together, this scholarship highlights both the constraints and possibilities of equity work. However, much of this research stops short of specifying how culturally grounded knowledge and care are enacted in practice within performance-driven STEM environments. Care is often treated as an affective trait or extracted as emotional labor (Noddings, 1984), rather than recognized as a deliberate, strategic, and relational form of leadership praxis (Khalifa et al., 2016).

This study introduces the concept of “Cariño Competence” to address this gap. Cariño Competence describes how WOC leaders mobilize care as a strategic and culturally grounded practice that supports individuals while simultaneously challenging inequitable systems. Guided by the research question—How do Women of Color leaders translate cultural intuition into culturally grounded praxis within STEM higher education initiatives?—the analysis explores how cultural intuition (Delgado Bernal, 1998; Rocha et al., 2024), relational accountability, and structural awareness intersect in leadership practice (Bensimon, 2020; Liera & Desir, 2023).

This study examines how WOC leaders within a multi-institutional STEM initiative translate cultural intuition into culturally grounded leadership praxis. The resulting framework, Cariño Competence, offers a precise lens for understanding how care functions as both a sustaining force and a strategic intervention against structural inequities. By detailing this identity-embedded praxis, the study clarifies the operationalization of equity-oriented leadership, framing care as a relational and transformative tool for institutional change within STEM higher education.

2. Relevant Literature

This literature review traces three interconnected strands shaping equity leadership in STEM. First, identity-embedded praxis is discussed, where leaders’ social identities and experiences inform decision-making and relational accountability (Bensimon, 2020; E. Kim & Ishimaru, 2025). Second, we consider structural inequities and invisible labor, capturing the disproportionate responsibilities and cultural taxation borne by WOC (Bensimon, 2018). Third, counterspaces, relational and epistemic sites where knowledge, care, and collective strategy sustain leadership and support equity-oriented action (Ong et al., 2018), are highlighted.

2.1. Equity Leadership as Identity-Embedded and Culturally Situated Praxis

Culturally responsive and equity-centered leadership helps us understand how leadership is historically situated, identity-mediated, and relationally enacted, challenging dominant paradigms that frame leadership as narrow, managerial, or efficiency-driven expertise that overlooks identity, power, and structural inequities (Bensimon, 2020; Liera & Desir, 2023). Equity leaders do not simply implement equity-orientated initiatives; they interpret institutional realities through lived experience and justice-oriented commitments. McNair et al. (2020) argue that moving from “equity talk” to “equity walk” requires expanding practitioner knowledge by foregrounding both leaders’ own race-conscious reflection and critical engagement with systemic inequities as central leadership capacities rather than peripheral dispositions.

Recent scholarship deepens this framing by positioning leadership as both an ontological (i.e., ways of being) and epistemological (i.e., ways of knowing) practice grounded in leaders’ social positioning, lived experience, and community-accountable knowledge production (Collins et al., 2020; Delgado Bernal et al., 2018). In this view, leadership is identity-embedded praxis, inseparable from the leader’s own lived experiences and the knowledge systems that shape how they interpret, navigate, and act within institutions. By “identity-embedded,” we mean that leadership is fundamentally shaped by the leader’s social positioning—including race/ethnicity, gender, and cultural background—which informs decision-making, relational practices, and engagement with institutional structures. Martinez (2025) conceptualizes leadership in nepantla as a liminal, in-between space where marginalized educational leaders negotiate tensions, contradictions, and competing institutional logics. Similarly, E. Kim and Ishimaru (2025) argue that leadership preparation must center identity, multilingualism, and relational accountability, while T. Kim and Ishimaru (2025) articulate radical relationality as an onto-epistemological grounding for educational leadership. Within these liminal and relational spaces, leadership often entails practices of care and relational labor that sustain trust, dignity, and belonging for those navigating inequitable institutional environments. Collectively, these perspectives shift the field from viewing leadership as technical skill acquisition to understanding it as praxis deeply intertwined with each leader’s own social identity and culturally situated experiences.

Identity development scholarship further reinforces this orientation by demonstrating that leadership identity is socially constructed through the dynamic interplay of race/ethnicity, gender, institutional norms, and community commitments (De La Cruz Albizu, 2024; Fuselier & Beatty, 2023). Leadership does not emerge in isolation; it develops within organizational contexts that signal whose authority is recognized and whose expertise is questioned. For WOC, leadership enactment is shaped by racialized and gendered positioning within higher education environments that simultaneously demand representation while scrutinizing legitimacy (Settles et al., 2022).

Accordingly, equity leadership must be understood not only as strategic or technical action but as an ongoing meaning-making process shaped by lived experience and structural constraint (Bensimon, 2020). Although this body of scholarship establishes identity and relational accountability as central to equity-oriented leadership (e.g., T. Kim & Ishimaru, 2025), less attention has been given to how culturally grounded epistemologies are operationalized within compliance-driven STEM initiatives. Examining this enactment requires sustained attention to racialized organizational contexts and the institutional labor demands that shape leaders’ daily decision-making (Bensimon et al., 2019; Ray, 2019).

2.2. Structural Inequities and the Burden of Equity Labor in STEM Leadership

Racialized organizational theory describes how institutions embed inequity within everyday policies, norms, and evaluation systems (Ray, 2019). In STEM higher education, narratives of objectivity and meritocracy often obscure structural exclusion while reinforcing narrow definitions of excellence (DeCuir-Gunby et al., 2020; McGee, 2020). Niemann (2012) and Muhs et al. (2020) document how WOC faculty and administrators are systematically underestimated, their expertise questioned, and their contributions devalued, highlighting persistent structural and cultural barriers across academic institutions.

For Educators of Color, conditional legitimacy and epistemic exclusion often manifest as holding formal leadership roles while being informally devalued or scrutinized within institutional evaluation and professional judgment systems (DeCuir-Gunby et al., 2020; Settles et al., 2022). Scholars further illustrate that WOC frequently shoulder disproportionate mentoring, diversity and service responsibilities—forms of cultural taxation and invisible labor (Bensimon, 2007, 2018)—while simultaneously navigating organizational cultures that question their expertise and undermine their authority though norms that privilege whiteness and traditional leadership models (Hall & Johnson, 2025). In practice, WOC may occupy official authority or leadership titles, yet their expertise, decisions, and contributions are frequently questioned, undermined by pervasive bias and organizational cultures that privilege whiteness and traditional leadership models (Hall & Johnson, 2025). Navigating these dynamics requires ongoing identity negotiation. For instance, Latina administrators may feel pressured to assimilate into whiteness to maintain professional credibility, highlighting the tensions inherent in leadership roles (Sánchez et al., 2021). In STEM contexts, Black women face similar marginalization within dominant institutional cultures, even as they are expected to lead equity-focused initiatives—oftentimes a form of cultural taxation—exposing the disproportionate labor and scrutiny borne by minoritized leaders (Dobbs & Leider, 2021; Hall & Johnson, 2025; Roby et al., 2022). Together, these studies illustrate how Educators of Color must continually balance institutional expectations, professional authority, and community accountability in environments that simultaneously recognize and constrain their leadership.

Scholarship on WOC professionals demonstrates that cumulative workplace demands contribute to heightened burnout, emotional exhaustion, and stress, as racialized and gendered organizational dynamics amplify the labor required to maintain visibility, credibility, and accountability to their communities (McGee & Stovall, 2026). In STEM leadership specifically, WOC often shoulder disproportionate equity labor (Gordon et al., 2024), performing mentoring (Nkrumah & Scott, 2022), representation (Miles et al., 2022), and diversity work (Rocha et al., 2024) that exceeds formal expectations while simultaneously navigating institutional scrutiny and systemic bias. Cultural taxation theory explains how these additional responsibilities accumulate to create ongoing pressures (Bensimon, 2018; Mahatmya et al., 2022). These pressures are further compounded by stereotype threat and imposter phenomenon (Collins et al., 2020), which WOC may experience in male-dominated STEM environments. Collins et al. (2020) illustrate this dynamic through ethnographic narratives of four WOC across multiple university settings, highlighting how the interplay of stereotype threat, imposter phenomenon, and chilly organizational climates can undermine confidence, intensify stress, and shape career trajectories in STEM. In academic and STEM contexts specifically, sustained diversity labor—mentoring, committee service, and equity advocacy—is often invisible and undervalued, a phenomenon explicitly theorized as invisible work (e.g., Jones & Kee, 2021) and frequently described as cultural taxation or emotional labor (Bensimon, 2018), reflecting the disproportionate burdens placed on WOC (Collins et al., 2020). These pressures are further obscured by dominant narratives of grit and resilience that mask the structural inequities producing them (e.g., McGee & Stovall, 2026). Racial battle fatigue compounds these challenges, manifesting in psychological and physiological stress (Mahatmya et al., 2022; McGee & Bentley, 2017). Recognizing the cumulative labor and scrutiny faced by minoritized leaders underscores the significance of counterspaces and collective infrastructures as sites of affirmation, strategy, and leadership sustainability.

2.3. Counterspaces and Collective Infrastructures for Leadership Sustainability

In response to exclusionary organizational climates, WOC cultivate counterspaces—intentional relational sites providing affirmation, mentorship, and collective sense-making (Ong et al., 2018). Counterspaces function as epistemic infrastructures, grounded within a Critical Race Theory (CRT) lens, where knowledge, care, and cultural intuition are validated, shared, and mobilized to navigate institutional constraints (Delgado Bernal et al., 2018; Solórzano, 2024; Yosso & Hanchett Hanson, 2026). CRT frames these spaces as not merely protective but transformative, challenging dominant norms and supporting equity-oriented leadership.

Within STEM leadership contexts, counterspaces allow leaders to refine cultural intuition, reconcile competing institutional logics, and make equity-centered decisions without sacrificing accountability to their communities (Martinez, 2025; Morales et al., 2023). They enhance professional judgment, moral clarity, and leadership effectiveness by mitigating institutional stressors (Pérez Huber et al., 2021). While research on counterspaces has examined student transformation (King et al., 2023) and the professional persistence of Educators of Color (Mahatmya et al., 2022; Ong et al., 2018), few studies explicitly examine their role in leadership enactment shaped by WOC leaders’ identities, experiences, and collective infrastructures.

Across these strands, equity leadership is conceptualized as identity-embedded praxis grounded in lived experience, cultural knowledge, and social positioning (Bensimon, 2020; Collins et al., 2020; Delgado Bernal et al., 2018). Counterspaces function as relational and epistemic infrastructures that sustain leaders, clarify ethical commitments, and support strategic action, illustrating how WOC navigate systemic inequities while cultivating collective structures that enable leadership sustainability and organizational transformation (DeCuir-Gunby et al., 2020; Hall & Johnson, 2025; Mahatmya et al., 2022; Ong et al., 2018). To examine how leaders make meaning of and act within these conditions, this study draws on an integrated conceptual and theoretical framework that centers culturally grounded ways of knowing.

2.4. Conceptual and Theoretical Framework

To examine how culturally grounded knowledge informs structurally responsive leadership practice, this study integrates Chicana Feminist Epistemology (CFE; Anzaldúa, 1987; Delgado Bernal, 2020), cultural intuition (CI; Delgado Bernal, 1998), cariño (Curry, 2021), and praxis (Freire, 1970). Together, these constructs provide an analytic lens for understanding how leaders draw upon lived experience to interpret institutional dynamics and enact equity-oriented action within racialized STEM contexts.

The framework begins with CFE, which centers knowledge produced from the lived experiences, histories, and community struggles of WOC (Delgado Bernal, 2020; García, 2023; Morales et al., 2023). CFE in the present study challenges dominant leadership models that treat equity as procedural compliance, instead positioning lived experience as a legitimate and necessary source of knowledge and ethical responsibility. Leadership is socially situated and historically informed; interpretations and actions are shaped by leaders’ positionalities and accountability to marginalized communities as well as the structural dynamics of racialized organizations, which embed inequities into institutional policies, routines, and norms (Ray, 2019).

Emerging from this epistemic grounding is cultural intuition. Delgado Bernal (1998) defined CI as a complex interpretive process acknowledging the unique perspectives Scholars of Color bring to research. Subsequent scholarship extends CI into educational practice, showing how it supports asset-based recognition of students’ cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005; Yosso & Hanchett Hanson, 2026), creates counter-spaces in STEM (Ong et al., 2018), and disrupts deficit narratives in leadership contexts (Acevedo et al., 2021; Rendón et al., 2020). Rocha et al. (2024) advance the Scholar–Practitioner Cultural Intuition (SP-CI) model, identifying resilience, vulnerability, validation, and advocacy as core enactments of CI in leadership. In this study, CI functions as the interpretive bridge between lived knowledge and institutional decision-making, enabling leaders to recognize structural inequities and anticipate students’ and communities’ relational and cultural needs.

While cultural intuition is interpretive, cariño represents its relational and ethical enactment. Valenzuela (1999) first distinguished authentic care from subtractive schooling, emphasizing students’ need to feel understood, respected, and valued beyond academic performance. Building on this, Curry (2021) reconceptualized cariño through a second wave of care—holistic, communal, and grounded in culture, spirit, and politics. Valdez and Amoakoh (2025) further articulated four dimensions of authentic cariño: authentic relationship building, ethical decision-making, critical consciousness, and community engagement. In higher education, Pearson et al. (2021) demonstrated how a cariño pedagogy guided flexible, equity-oriented decision-making during COVID-19, illustrating how relational accountability—the ongoing responsibility to act in ways that honor and sustain relationships with students, staff, and community—shapes institutional responses. Prior work (e.g., Curry, 2021; Pearson et al., 2021; Valdez & Amoakoh, 2025) has primarily examined cariño in teaching and classroom contexts, illustrating how it structures relational, ethnical, and culturally grounded practices. Building on this scholarship, the present study examines how cariño operates within leadership practice in everyday institutional settings, shaping how leaders translate cultural intuition into concrete, equity-oriented action.

Drawing on Freire (1970), praxis describes the iterative process through which critical awareness becomes concrete intervention or enactment. Contemporary scholarship situates praxis as an ongoing cycle in which leaders reflect on context, identity, and justice while enacting purposeful change (Nganga et al., 2025; Guthrie & Beatty, 2022). For example, Nganga et al. (2025) show that graduates of an equity-focused educational leadership program were able to transfer knowledge of self, content, and dialogic skills into their local contexts to address injustice and oppressive structures. Similarly, Guthrie and Beatty (2022) describe leaders who, after reflecting on systemic inequities, implemented policies aimed at redistributing resources more equitably. Together, these studies illustrate how critical reflection in praxis can inform purposeful action, linking knowledge and awareness to tangible, equity-oriented practices in leadership contexts. While these studies highlight praxis in leadership learning, less is known about how it operates as a sustained, equity-oriented practice within racialized institutional contexts, particularly in conjunction with culturally grounded competencies such as CI and cariño.

Taken together, the frameworks utilized in this study position equity-oriented leadership as a sequential yet iterative process: grounded in epistemic understanding (CFE), informed and sustained by culturally grounded care (cariño), activated through interpretive awareness (CI), and sustained through transformative action (praxis). By conceptualizing cariño as a culturally grounded leadership orientation–rooted in leaders’ identity, lived experiences, and community knowledge—activated through CI and enacted through praxis, examines how care both shapes and is shaped by interpretive awareness and praxis, highlighting the recursive nature of equity-orientated decision-making. Building on this integrated framework, the study explores the lived experiences and decision-making processes of WOC leaders in STEM initiatives.

3. Methodology

This study explores how WOC leaders enact culturally grounded leadership within STEM higher education initiatives designed to advance equity for historically marginalized students. Guided by CFE and CI (Delgado Bernal, 1998; Rocha et al., 2024), we employed a qualitative research design that centers lived experience, relational knowledge, and structural awareness. The following section describes the research design, including the study context, participants, data collection, analytic procedures, and strategies for ensuring trustworthiness and reflexive rigor. We close this section with author’s positionality statements that informed this work.

3.1. Research Design

This study employed a qualitative methodology grounded in CFE and CI, centering participants’ lived, embodied, and community-rooted knowledge as legitimate epistemic sources. Rather than conceptualizing leadership as a set of decontextualized competencies, this approach positions leadership as historically situated, relationally enacted, and shaped by identity, power, and structural conditions (Bensimon, 2020). By informing both data generation and analysis, cultural intuition, as articulated by Delgado Bernal (1998) is thus conceptualized as an analytic resource through which experiential knowledge and structural critique shape meaning-making.

Grounded in this epistemological stance, five semi-structured interviews elicited concrete leadership moments—instances of intervention, tension, protection, and boundary-setting. Interviews were analyzed through iterative coding cycles that moved from narrative accounts to cross-case pattern identification, attending to how experiential knowledge and structural critique shaped leadership decision-making. Through this analytic process, a coherent construct—Cariño Competence—emerged to describe an embodied, relational, and structurally aware leadership praxis enacted within and against racialized STEM structures.

3.2. Research Context and Participants

This study included five WOC who participated in a larger IRB-approved research project, with informed consent obtained from all participants prior to data collection. The larger, federally funded, multi-institutional STEM initiative spanned 20 campuses–including community colleges, 4-year colleges, and universities—designed to advance equity for historically marginalized students. These institutions included Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) and emerging HSIs (eHSIs), where Latinx students comprise at least 25% of the student body, spanning four U.S. regions: West, Southwest, South-Central, and the East. While the HSI/eHSI designation is not the primary analytic focus, the study centers on how these institutional contexts shape equity-oriented leadership, capturing how WOC navigate systemic inequities and enact culturally grounded STEM leadership across diverse campuses and regions.

The participants—Rebekah, Beyoncé, Corina, Abigail, and Linda—held central roles as program directors, consultants, and/or leaders of a working group within a grant-funded initiative aimed at advancing equity-focused STEM initiatives. This initiative (hereafter referred to as “the program”) encompassed various activities designed to support equitable STEM learning environments across participation institutions. Within the program, the participants served as subject matter experts applying their leadership and expertise to guide program activities and implement equity-centered strategies. Each brought more than 15 years of professional experience supporting equitable STEM learning environments. All five self-identified as WOC and held master’s- or doctoral-level degrees in STEM or social science fields. Pseudonyms were used to maintain confidentiality. Figure 1 provides a visual representation of the distribution of our participants’ background.

3.3. Data Collection and Analysis

The interviews for the current study were conducted during the 2024–2025 academic year, focusing on how these leaders enacted culturally grounded care and critical consciousness within STEM initiatives. Data were generated through in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted via secure video conferencing (Patton, 2015). Interview protocols focused on participants’ role and responsibilities, decision-making processes, and experiences navigating institutional systems within the grant context. Interviews lasted approximately 60 min, were recorded with consent, and video-conference-generated transcripts were reviewed and corrected for accuracy by the research team. The analysis was inductive and participant-driven (Charmaz, 2014; Patton, 2015). While our theoretical framing informed our attention to relational and structural dynamics, the concept of Cariño Competence emerged from patterns identified across participants’ narratives during the analytic process.

Our team-based, multi-phase analytic approach aligns with methodological guidance for preserving narrative richness and strengthening trustworthiness in collaborative qualitative analysis (Abraham et al., 2021). The analytic goal was to understand how WOC leaders enacted culturally grounded care within STEM initiatives, which ultimately led to the emergence of Cariño Competence as an analytic construct. The first phase consisted of open coding (Charmaz, 2014; Strauss & Corbin, 1998). We conducted holistic readings of each transcript, generating initial open codes that stayed close to participants’ own words—examples included “the students,” “speaking up,” “drawing boundaries,” and “holding each other accountable.” Through this process, analytic memos were written to capture emerging patterns, reflexive observations, and interpretive insights, laying the groundwork for subsequent, more focused examination (Charmaz, 2014; Strauss & Corbin, 1998).

Guided by cultural intuition (Rocha et al., 2024), we considered not only what participants did but how their actions reflected structural awareness, relational accountability, and moral reasoning. Through iterative discussion and consensus, these clusters were refined into four interrelated dimensions of Cariño Competence: relational attunement grounded in moral obligation; protective action within racialized STEM structures; boundary-setting as care and resistance to extraction; and community-sustained resilience through WOC networks. While the dimensions themselves emerged directly from participants’ voices and our iterative analytic process, Ray’s (2019) was referenced here solely to contextualize these patterns, offering insight into the compliance-heavy, inequity-laden STEM environments that shaped both the constraints participants navigated and the opportunities for enacting care-based leadership.

The second phase involved constant comparison across transcripts (Strauss & Corbin, 1998), where the team explored how participant-generated codes––(1a) student-centered moral anchor, (2a) buffering institutional failure, (3a) resisting extractive leadership, and (4a) counterspaces for WOC––clustered around culturally grounded leadership praxis. Through iterative, collaborative analysis, the codes listed in

Table 1. Cariño Competence Codebook.

CODE	CODE Definition	Theme	THEME Definition
(1a) Student-Centered Moral Anchor	Centering students as the “why” behind decisions. This can include a reference to a similar lived experience.	1. Relational Attunement as Moral Obligation	Leadership practices through which Women of Color attune to the lived realities of students, colleagues, and community members, grounding decisions in ethical responsibility rather than procedural compliance.
(1b) Ethical Reflexivity	Naming moral responsibility, ethics, or obligation. This can include self-interrogation of impact.
(1c) Relational Listening	Adjusting leadership actions based on relational awareness, an attention to others’ lived experiences and relationship building.
(2a) Buffering Institutional Failure	Intervening when systems cause harm	2. Protective Action in Response to Institutional Harm	Acts of intervention, buffering, or resistance enacted when institutional structures, leadership, or grant systems fail to protect students, staff, or equity goals.
(2b) Calling Out Dominant Whiteness	Challenging dominant/white institutional norms
(2c) Data as Shield	Creating safeguards (e.g., documentation, data protection) as evidence of impact or to protect credibility.
(2d) Counter-Surveillance	Naming mistrust, false accusations, or racialized harm
(3a) Resisting Extractive Leadership	Capacity Assertion—naming experiences overwork/excessive labor without adequate pay. Refusal as Ethical Action—framing boundaries as care, not disengagement; self-care Racialized Labor Awareness—explicit resistance to exploitation; Burnout narratives	3. Boundary-Setting as Care	Leadership practices that resist extractive labor expectations by setting boundaries as an ethical act of self-preservation and collective sustainability.
(4a) Women of Color Counterspaces	Naming intentional (counter)spaces as survival or reliance on relationships for collective meaning/sense making.	4. Community-Sustained Resilience and Counterspaces	The cultivation of networks, counterspaces, and collective care among Women of Color that sustain leadership resilience and protect against institutional harm.

emerged inductively, capturing nuanced dimensions and variations within each primary code while remaining grounded in participants’ lived experiences and narratives. This iterative process of coding, comparison, and theme development aligns with established approaches to thematic analysis used to generate conceptual models in qualitative research (Naeem et al., 2023). Table 1 provides a detailed view of the codebook and definitions for each code. These codes became what we ultimately describe as the four dimensions of Cariño Competence.

In the final analytic phase, we conducted cross-case comparisons to identify both shared patterns and variation across participants’ experiences (Yin, 2018). This step allowed us to examine how dimensions of Cariño Competence manifested differently depending on leaders’ institutional roles, authority, and contexts. For example, some leaders enacted protective action through formal decision-making authority, while others relied on negotiation, strategic compliance, or informal advocacy when navigating institutional constraints.

Consistent with qualitative rigor, we incorporated a methodological emphasis on seeking disconfirming evidence (Erickson, 1986) while also reflexively attending to unexpected or contradictory patterns. This approach prevented us from portraying care-based leadership as universally effective, costless, or inherently transformative within inequitable institutional systems. For example, initial interpretations might suggest that leaders leaving their positions were not fully committed or prioritized themselves over the work. However, through iterative team discussions and engagement with participants’ narratives, we reconsidered this interpretation: departures were often the result of structural pressures, including racialized experiences and cultural taxation, rather than a lack of care or commitment. By attending to moments like these—when leaders faced structural limitations, experienced tension or ambivalence, or negotiated competing institutional demands—we were able to capture both the possibilities and boundaries of culturally grounded care within racialized STEM contexts. This final analytic step strengthened the credibility of our findings while illuminating the complexity of leaders’ experiences. As Erickson (1986) notes, researchers who do not actively seek disconfirming evidence risk focusing only on information that supports their interpretations. Contradictory evidence and interpretations should be critically appraised to reveal potential inadequacies in the original analysis (Erickson, 1986). In this study, attending to disconfirming evidence also enhanced our understanding of Cariño Competence, revealing both how care-based leadership is enacted and the structural conditions that constrain or enable its practice.

3.4. Trustworthiness and Reflexivity

Trustworthiness was supported through sustained engagement with participants’ narratives, iterative analysis across data sources, and reflexive memoing to surface analytic assumptions (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Interviews were the primary data source, and analytic rigor was strengthened through collaborative analysis across the research team. Consistent with Erickson’s (1998) guidance that qualitative assertions should be systematically cross-checked, emerging patterns and interpretations were examined across researchers to confirm that themes accurately reflected participants’ narratives. After team meetings, an audit trail and peer debriefing were used to enhance credibility and dependability, while reflexive memoing and iterative team dialogue strengthened confirmability by ensuring that analytic interpretations remained grounded in the data (Patton, 2015).

As Scholars of Color, we approach this study with commitments shaped by lived experience, community accountability, and scholarly engagement with cultural intuition. Consistent with CFE (Anzaldúa, 1987; Delgado Bernal, 1998), we do not bracket these positionalities; rather, we engage them reflexively as analytic resources while grounding all claims in participant data. Reflexive memoing and iterative dialogue functioned as safeguards against projection and strengthened analytic rigor. Reflexive engagement with positionality allowed the research team to surface assumptions, interrogate interpretations, and remain accountable to participants’ narratives throughout the analytic process.

In this study, rigor is understood as methodological transparency, reflexive accountability, and analytic coherence rather than objectivist neutrality. This approach aligns with epistemological commitments that recognize knowledge as relational, historically situated, and shaped by lived experience. Our positionalities informed the study’s orientation toward relational accountability and structural critique, aligning methodologically with the epistemological commitments that underpin the construct of Cariño Competence. These practices collectively supported the credibility, dependability, and confirmability of the study. The following positionality statements situate the research team and clarify how our lived experiences and scholarly commitments informed the study.

3.5. Positionality Statements

Janet Rocha is a Chicana scholar–practitioner whose lived experience and professional engagement in STEM-Medicine equity work informed the study’s reflexive orientation. Her background provided cultural insight and analytic sensitivity, while her participation in the broader research project offered an insider perspective on the practices, constraints, and opportunities of WOC leaders. Analyses remained grounded in participants’ narratives, centering their voices while drawing on her dual positionality as both researcher in this study and practitioner on the grant.

Lucy Arellano is a Xicana faculty member from East LA, first generation college student, whose research critically interrogates forms of oppression embedded in the academy. This perspective is deeply informed by her own navigation of racialized and gendered STEM environments. In this study, Lucy ensured that the analysis remained grounded in relational accountability while honoring the complexity of the participants’ leadership practices challenging the structural inequities embedded in STEM initiatives.

Margarita A. Rodriguez is a first-generation scholar of Guatemalan descent whose work primarily focuses on equity-based approaches to language and STEM for multilingual learners. She is influenced by her experience as a bilingual elementary school teacher and foundation in sociocultural approaches to learning as she approaches the questions in this research.

Juan Carlos Murillo is a Mexican-born, U.S.-naturalized, first-generation, post-traditional student who returned to higher education after 20 years in professional roles, including working as a travel agent in the United States conducting business across international contexts. These experiences exposed him to diverse social systems and inequities, shaping his understanding of institutional structures, educational opportunity, and the unique challenges faced by first-generation college students—insights that resonate with the focus of this study. Committed to global citizenship and equity, he critically examines systems of inequity while pursuing solutions to challenges at the local, national, and global levels.

4. Findings: The Emergence of Cariño Competence in STEM Leadership

Analysis of participants’ narratives revealed a set of recurring leadership practices through which WOC leaders enacted culturally grounded care while navigating racialized STEM institutional contexts. From these patterns, the construct of Cariño Competence emerged as an analytic framework. Cariño Competence emerged as an analytic framework. From these patterns, the construct of Cariño Competence emerged as an analytic framework. As shown in Figure 2, four interrelated dimensions of Cariño Competence were identified: (1) relational attunement grounded in moral obligation; (2) protective action within racialized STEM structures; (3) boundary-setting as care and resistance to extraction; and (4) community-sustained resilience through WOC networks.

While these dimensions are interconnected and mutually reinforcing, the first two dimensions are further organized into analytically derived subthemes, representing patterned leadership practices grounded in participant narratives. To enhance clarity, subthemes (where applicable) are introduced, followed by illustrative excerpts and analytic interpretation. Our conceptualization of the interconnected nature of these four dimensions and their theoretical grounding are illustrated in Figure 2.

4.1. Cariño Competence 1: Relational Attunement Grounded in Moral Obligation

Leaders consistently described their decision-making as rooted in ethical responsibility toward students, particularly those historically marginalized in STEM. Relational attunement reflects an intentional orientation toward understanding, anticipating, and responding to students’ lived experiences. Rather than viewing leadership as procedural or hierarchical, participants positioned students. Rather than viewing leadership as procedural or hierarchical, participants positioned students as the moral anchor for programmatic and institutional choices. Through relational attunement, leaders integrated anticipatory care, ethical reflexivity, and intentional listening into their praxis, ensuring that initiatives were responsive, equitable, and culturally sustaining. This dimension consists of three interrelated subthemes: (1) student-anchored moral commitment, (2) ethical reflexivity, and (3) relational listening.

4.1.1. Student-Anchored Moral Commitment

Participants identified students as the primary motivator for their work in the STEM initiative and remained attentive to the particular racialized experiences faced by Students of Color in STEM. In this dimension, cariño operated as relational attunement—an intentional orientation toward understanding, anticipating, and responding to students’ lived realities. Students thus anchored decision-making within the federally funded project. Abigail explained illustrates this student-anchored decision-making:

That’s how I run things… I put students in the forefront of my decision-making. If I make this decision, how is it gonna impact them [students]? So [in] the PDs [professional development sessions], my audience is [higher education agents], but with the intent to impact our students.

This reflection illustrates deliberate evaluative practice: students are the grounding criterion for leadership action. Even agent-oriented professional development is reframed as student-driven, emphasizing that students are the organizing purpose of institutional processes.

Another participant, Corina, emphasized intentional design attentive to racialized STEM harm: “We can be intentional about the way we design them [programs]. We can be intentional about how we think about students and why we’re doing these things… It’s a particularly important practice for Students of Color… [acknowledging] that there’s STEM trauma”. By naming “STEM trauma,” Corina situates leadership within structural realities. She added:

This is very personal work [for me] having done STEM… [It] was really a negative experience for me as a cultural individual, as a woman, and as somebody who was just trying to have relationships with professors and people within STEM…. So I’ve always been like the person arguing for something to be different, because the student experience is so crappy.

By calling on her own lived experience, Corina uses her relational attunement to ensure that current students do not suffer the same trauma. Relational attunement thus involves anticipatory care—designing curricula and initiatives with attention to students’ lived experiences. These statements extend Noddings’ (1984) ethics of care, embedding moral attentiveness in leadership praxis rather than limiting it to classroom interaction, and align with culturally responsive leadership scholarship (Khalifa et al., 2016). WOC leaders framed decision-making through a moral lens, drawing upon cultural intuition (Delgado Bernal, 1998) to guide action within and against institutional constraints.

4.1.2. Ethical Reflexivity

Leaders demonstrated critical awareness of institutional inequity, recognizing how structural dynamics shaped students’ experiences and their own positionality within STEM leadership spaces. When asked to describe her approach to leadership, Linda illustrated the critical lens she brought to the organization. She first described how certain members had tokenized People of Color in the writing of the grant, and elaborates the responsibilities of her role:

It’s important in our roles to keep people accountable, particularly those that are in positions of power… from a sense of responsibility, I felt like we had to do that. And that it wouldn’t have been right to continue getting paid and then know that the work is not really in alignment with what they’re saying it is.

Ethical reflexivity here extends beyond relational warmth to institutional accountability. Care requires refusing complicity in systems that reproduce harm. Interrogating her own positionality, Corina reflected:

I even had the privilege of probably presenting as a white person and I’m also not first-gen… that all fits into my feelings of privilege that I need to use that for helping… put a platform together for people to talk about their experiences that are different from mine.

Reflexivity thus operated at multiple levels—outward toward institutional power and inward toward personal positioning—demonstrating that student-centered leadership is inseparable from ethical self-interrogation. Participants recognized that organizational systems often privilege leaders aligned with dominant norms, including whiteness, and that their own positionality shaped how they were perceived and prioritized within these structures. Consistent with scholarship on equity-oriented leadership (e.g., Bensimon, 2020), they understood inequity as structurally produced and leadership as requiring ongoing moral vigilance—constant attention to ethical responsibility and fairness—while remaining aware of how their decisions and actions affect marginalized communities. In this context, reflexivity served as a critical tool for navigating racialized organizational dynamics and fostering more equitable outcomes.

4.1.3. Relational Listening

Finally, relational attunement manifested through leaders’ intentional listening, prompting them to adjust actions based on deep attention to lived experience. Abigail described this relational listening as she shared:

Everything is very intentional for me and [in] collaboration … I want to understand your challenges, what you bring to the table… I think it goes back to this culture of cariño of just organically wanting to create relationships, getting to know individuals and understanding what the individual brings.

Leaders deliberately cultivated knowledge of individual perspectives and needs by listening intentionally within the culturally grounded practice of cariño. Linda highlights how listening informed programmatic adaptation:

Whenever we would do registrations for our trainings, we would ask them [higher education agents], “What are you experiencing right now?” And that was helpful, because then we were able to customize it… It’s not like the [key leaders were] telling us “Here’s some areas that’s been coming up” so that I think has been a missed opportunity.

The reference to a “missed opportunity” signals a gap in top-down guidance: key leaders did not proactively provide information that could have informed programmatic decisions. This absence, however, foregrounded the ethical and strategic importance of relational listening, as leaders had to actively engage stakeholders to surface training-based needs themselves. Relational listening thus translated insights into responsive action, ensuring initiatives addressed concrete challenges rather than following pre-determined agendas.

Together, these accounts demonstrate that Cariño Competence is not merely affective care; it entails actively seeking and integrating knowledge of others’ perspectives into decision-making, especially when structural supports are absent. Participants often exemplified multiple sub-tenets of Cariño Competence simultaneously, and these dimensions frequently overlapped in practice, reflecting the dynamic and interconnected nature of culturally grounded leadership. This aligns with contemporary scholarship documenting how leaders draw on culturally grounded knowledge and embodied intuition as a strategic, contextually informed epistemic resources that shape leadership practice within structurally inequitable environments (e.g., Estrada et al., 2024; Rocha et al., 2024).

4.2. Cariño Competence 2: Protective Action in Response to Institutional Harm

Participants enacted Cariño Competence as strategic intervention when institutional systems failed to protect students or staff. This dimension of leadership extended relational care into the realm of structural defense, where leaders absorbed, mitigated, and redirected potential harm to safeguard both people and mission. Protective action was enacted not as reactionary labor but as deliberate, anticipatory, and ethically grounded intervention. This dimension was organized into several interrelated subthemes, each representing a patterned leadership practice: (1) calling out dominant whiteness and structural misalignment, (2) buffering institutional harm through relational shields, (3) using data as a protective shield, and (4) engaging in counter-surveillance to address mistrust and racialized harm. Each subtheme is presented below with illustrative participant narratives.

4.2.1. Calling Out Dominant Whiteness and Structural Misalignment

Leaders confronted institutional norms that privileged dominant (white) perspectives, challenging assumptions about efficiency, merit, and “fit,” in STEM contexts. This practice involved identifying inequitable treatment and refusing to reproduce superficial equity rhetoric. Linda described these dynamics, noting how her team created boundaries in response to inequitable leadership practices:

It was very clear that… me and my colleagues were all WOC with doctorates. We’re all published. We feel pretty confident about our skills, and I felt like we were sort of seen as the help… So… it was very weird to have women who were running the grant, but clearly did not have an understanding of … the way that they operate in the world. That’s not equity-minded, and would not be culturally affirming, or anything like that.

In response to this intuition, Linda shared that she and other colleagues requested to stop meeting with a specific person who was exemplifying these problematic dynamics. This account illustrates strategic intervention: by naming inequitable practices, Linda and her colleagues asserted authority, created structural distance, and resisted hierarchies that diminished their expertise. Similarly, Beyoncé reflected on the persistent tokenization and dismissal of the expertise that the WOC brought to this space:

The structures were janky. The relationship building was an afterthought. The culturally responsive strategies were thrown in there as trigger words and sort of tokenized… People of Color were brought in to do this work, and we were always treated as such when we spoke up. … we were told to reflect upon our own perceptions and basically deal with it ourselves.

Together, these accounts demonstrate that calling out dominant whiteness was thus not merely a critique, but also a deliberate protective shield, requiring careful negotiation of power to safeguard equity goals. Leaders named inequitable practices, challenged epistemic authority, and refused to accept superficial equity rhetoric, all while navigating conditional legitimacy and heightened scrutiny. This approach reflects organizational norms as racialized (Ray, 2019) and aligns with culturally responsive leadership scholarship emphasizing equity as inherently disruptive (Khalifa et al., 2016). Protective action in this context required careful calibration of voice, authority, and positional power to safeguard equity goals and prevent harm from cascading to staff.

4.2.2. Buffering Institutional Harm: Creating Relational Shields

Protective action also involved creating relational and structural buffers to shield staff and students from harm when formal systems failed. Rather than retreating or individualizing the harm, these leaders cultivated collective infrastructures that mitigated the effects of racialized marginalization. Beyoncé reflected:

Microaggressions from the leadership team, that’ll hinder anyone’s progress. Lack of equitable advancement, either in title or salary hindered my willingness to persist in that work. The leadership did very little to inspire, support, advocate for and tether us to purpose. The only reason I was able to navigate those challenges is because of the community that we had cultivated in our little counter space through our colega hood.

This articulation reveals buffering as a structural response to institutional abandonment. The harm described—microaggressions, inequitable advancement, absence of advocacy—originated from formal leadership hierarchies. Yet rather than allowing those conditions to dictate attrition or disengagement, participants constructed counterspaces that functioned as protective shields. These cultivated “colega hood” communities were not incidental friendships; they were intentional, relational infrastructures that sustained persistence when formal systems failed.

Buffering, in this sense, operated as collective resistance. By creating counterspaces, leaders mitigated the psychological and professional toll of racialized surveillance and stagnation. Such spaces provided affirmation, strategic sense-making, and shared navigation of inequitable norms. In doing so, participants enacted cariño not only as interpersonal care but as protective containment—absorbing institutional shock so that harm did not fully destabilize their leadership practice or the students who depended on them.

As a buffer to harm, participants refused to allow hostile structures to define their leadership legitimacy. Instead, they enacted protective action that sustained themselves, their colleagues, and ultimately the students served via the initiative. Participants described stepping in when the project’s structure—or lack thereof—produced harm or misalignment. Linda reflected:

I think that we were really influential in bringing, like authentic leadership to the conversations. I know that had we not talked about how like microaggressions were happening for people who were supporting the grant that it would have been way worse for [the larger project], because then they would have had… people who were continuously… perpetuating these thoughts that really impact students right at the end of the day, like, if that trickles down and impacts students.

Here, buffering institutional failure took the form of direct intervention within leadership discourse. Rather than allowing microaggressions to remain unnamed, participants inserted equity-centered critique into grant conversations. The leader’s reflection makes clear that silence would have permitted harm to intensify and cascade toward students. By surfacing racialized dynamics within the team, participants functioned as institutional safeguards, interrupting narratives and behaviors that, if left unchecked, would have undermined equity goals.

Abigail described anticipatory intervention when discussing challenges with leadership:

I am a person who is proactive, meaning I don’t wait until I see the challenge to modify it… there’s been incidents where me and another colega would say “we need to do it this way,” or “this is anticipation,” or “this is what’s missing,” and it’s dismissed just because we’re not there yet… and eventually it does happen… [and] if [key leaders] would have listened, we would have been ahead of the game… that’s what happens a lot with Scholars of Color where [we’re told] “you’re not cooperative” or “you’re passionate, you should do it”… but you probably wouldn’t have said that to a white male colleague.

This account illustrates buffering as forward-looking protection. Abigail attempted to correct structural misalignment before it escalated into crisis, yet her expertise was discounted within racialized dynamics. Despite this dismissal, the act of naming gaps and anticipating breakdowns constituted protective labor—efforts to prevent institutional failure from harming staff or students downstream.

Together, these accounts illustrate buffering as strategic interruption of compliance-driven inertia and racialized dismissal. Participants challenged decisions, omissions, and generalized norms that overlooked student realities and perpetuated inequitable conditions. In doing so, they assumed risk; intervening in leadership spaces that exposed them to scrutiny, marginalization, or accusations of not being “a team player.” As scholarship notes, marginalized leaders often navigate institutional constraints while incrementally reshaping them, placing them in professionally vulnerable positions (Ray, 2019; Rocha et al., 2024). Within this theme, Cariño Competence functioned as protective action—leaders absorbing institutional friction and intervening directly when systems failed to safeguard equity commitments.

4.2.3. Data as Shield—Proactively Safeguarding Equity Through Evidence

When institutional systems threatened equity goals, leaders engaged in protective action through the strategic use of data to safeguard credibility, document impact, and preempt institutional misjudgment. Rather than collecting evidence solely for compliance, participants used data proactively to anticipate challenges, substantiate their interventions, and protect both their students and their programs from being dismissed or misrepresented. Abigail reflected on this practice:

So one example is the fact that we weren’t expected to collect data after our PDs. We decided to do that because if anyone says, “No, I didn’t like that, you’re not creating impact,” I’ll draw on the data and challenge that without being rude, very professional. “Look, this is what our members said.” … We basically wanted to protect ourselves from anyone saying, “You’re not performing. You’re not delivering.”

In this context, data functioned as a protective shield, enabling leaders to substantiate their professional judgment and safeguard the integrity of their work before concerns could escalate into formal scrutiny. In these practices, data becomes a protective, relational, and ethical tool, allowing leaders to advocate effectively while shielding students and programs. Collecting evidence thus became an ethical practice of care, ensuring that professional learning experiences and programmatic contributions were recognized and protected within institutional systems that might otherwise overlook or question them.

The participants also used data to align decision-making with student outcomes and program goals. Rebekah described requesting engagement metrics to ensure the program’s central objective remained visible and accountable: “What I’ve been asking for in the last year is specific data on numbers of students that have been served in [program learning goal]…[t]he major goal of the grant was to do that.” Here, documenting student participation functioned as a means of protecting the initiative’s equity mission by making student impact visible within institutional reporting systems. Similarly, Linda emphasized using participant feedback to guide program adjustments, allowing her to tailor professional learning to the needs of the educators she supported. In these examples, data served not only as documentation but as a relational practice that allowed leaders to remain accountable and responsive to those they served.

These accounts illustrate that leveraging data is not merely a technical task, but a form of protective, equity-centered leadership. By documenting impact, surfacing gaps, and making evidence visible, leaders anticipated institutional scrutiny, safeguarded their programs and students from misjudgment, and created the conditions to advocate effectively for resources and recognition, protecting equity work while enabling leaders to intervene strategically within racialized STEM structures (Khalifa et al., 2016; Rocha et al., 2024).

4.2.4. Counter-Surveillance: Naming Mistrust and Racialized Harm

Leaders enacted counter-surveillance as a protective leadership practice. Counter-surveillance refers to strategies used by marginalized leaders to recognize, document, and challenge institutional scrutiny directed at them, particularly when such scrutiny reflects racialized assumptions or mistrust. These practices included naming false accusations, systematically documenting interactions, and cultivating relational buffers–trusted relationships through which leaders collectively processed harm, validated one another’s experiences, and strategized responses to institutional scrutiny.

Beyoncé explicitly called attention to how other leaders on the grant had tokenized People of Color in the execution of the grant work while demonstrating limited genuine commitment to relationship building and culturally responsive leadership. This account highlights how leaders not only recognized inequitable treatment and misrepresentation but also actively created protective counterspaces to safeguard themselves and their colleagues. By establishing these relational and structural supports, participants mitigated the risks of misattribution, surveillance, or punitive responses while maintaining focus on equity-centered goals.

Corina further illustrates how unmet expectations and leadership inexperience contributed to ongoing mistrust:

The challenge with leadership in this grant is that it was too big for someone with not very much experience… people were bringing ideas to the table, and it was almost like it didn’t even happen. That is incredibly disappointing to people who spent time brainstorming and organizing.

This reflection underscores that counter-surveillance extended beyond reactive measures; it required ongoing vigilance, documentation, and strategic action when institutional systems failed to respond or actively undermined marginalized staff. Through these practices, leaders enacted Cariño Competence, translating cultural intuition and ethical responsibility into protective, relationally grounded actions that extended individual ethics into institutional equity commitments (Delgado Bernal, 2020; McGee et al., 2023). As McGee et al. (2023) emphasize, advancing equity requires embedding ethical practices within institutional structures. In practice, WOC leaders combined relational care with proactive strategies to address racialized harm, misinformation, and structural inequities, ensuring that staff and student well-being remained central in high-stakes institutional contexts.

4.3. Cariño Competence 3: Boundary-Setting as Care

Cariño Competence in this domain reflects deliberate resistance to extractive labor expectations through personal and structural boundaries. Boundary-setting is not disengagement, but rather it is an ethical act of self-preservation and collective sustainability, protecting both leaders’ well-being and the integrity of their work within demanding institutional contexts. By asserting limits, participants ensured relational care could remain actionable and sustainable over time. Abigail articulated her commitment to self-care as a form of boundary setting:

Self-care in these spaces is very important. So taking care of yourself when your head hurts, when the back of your eyes [hurt], or your body is telling you, you need to take care of yourself… a lot of the signs that our body tells us, especially as women, Women of Color, it’s telling you, you need to get some fresh air.

Additional forms of boundary setting included stating individual capacity limits directly: “I’m out of capacity. I cannot take on that role.” This refusal reframes declining labor not as inadequacy, but as principled leadership. Abigail’s boundary interrupts the institutional assumption that overextension equals commitment, positioning ethical care as contingent on capacity rather than personal endurance.

At a structural level, strategic distancing further illustrates ethical boundary-setting in relational practice. Linda explained, “We asked to stop meeting with a particular member…who we felt was really sort of perpetuating a white savior mindset”. This refusal protects both personal and collective well-being, preventing relational care from being co-opted into harmful dynamics. The necessity of such boundaries was evident in participants’ accounts of multiple, compressed responsibilities. Beyoncé highlighted: “We’re now schedulers, we’re now leaders, we’re the PD [developers], and the researchers…”. Corina reflected on the emotional cost of dysfunction: “I’ve frankly never been part of anything this dysfunctional ever…[I feel] so burnt, you know, from doing the work”. These examples illustrate how relational leadership risks depletion without explicit limits.

Consistent with relational attunement, participants enacted leadership through deeply care-centered relationships with students, colleagues, and the broader community. This praxis of boundary-setting as care underscores that such relational labor remains sustainable only when intentionally paired with personal and structural boundaries. By interrupting institutional dependence on uncompensated emotional and infrastructural labor, boundary-setting preserves leaders’ long-term capacity to support their communities. In this sense, relational care is both ethical and strategic—an act of resistance that sustains people and practice alike. These practices resonate with scholarship documenting the disproportionate cultural taxation and diversity labor placed on WOC in academic and STEM contexts, where boundary-setting becomes a necessary strategy for sustaining equity-oriented leadership within demanding institutional environments (Bensimon, 2018; Jones & Kee, 2021).

4.4. Cariño Competence 4: Creating Counterspaces as Relational Scaffolds for Leadership Resilience

Building on the protective strategies described as actions in response to institutional harm, participants positioned counterspaces as critical relational infrastructures that enabled WOC to navigate microaggressions and structural barriers in contexts where formal institutional support was insufficient. Counterspaces have been theorized as safe, relational environments that support WOC’s persistence in STEM and educational leadership (Ong et al., 2018; Rocha et al., 2024). Beyoncé described the role that the other WOC played in her ability to persist in this space:

All the Women of Color that were on the grant… that was the only way I was able to get through those challenges, because, even after having expressed on multiple occasions my disillusionment, my frustration, my worry, my… any emotion that emerges from having experienced microaggressions. Nothing was done.

Beyoncé’s reflection illustrates how the other WOC on the grant intentionally provided emotional support, shared sense-making, and strategic guidance. The support cultivated in this counterspace transformed challenges into empowerment, resilience, and professional growth in the face of racialized challenges.

Counterspaces functioned as both refuge and mechanism, mitigating harm while simultaneously enabling knowledge production, mentorship, moral validation, and healing from cumulative microaggressions. Abigail shared:

“It has been a privilege to be part of this leadership role because, as a Latina, there is not a lot of representation of Scholars of Color in these spaces. For me, there are times I feel challenged, but it is also about gaining knowledge in spaces that many of us don’t have access to—and using that as a learning opportunity to teach others what we would have done differently.”

Importantly, the impact of these counterspaces was seen beyond the context of the grant as Rebekah gives one example of how she has continued this work in her external roles. She describes:

A young Latino, who just joined my company … and I said…, “You will meet me because, number one, I am a part of the employee resource group, and you know I want to connect you. Number two, I’m not anywhere in your reporting chain. And so that means you can ask me any ridiculous outlandish question and no one that you work with or report with will ever know. And number three like, if you just get lost or don’t feel like this is for you, you come over. You know, right here.” And today he’s working right next to my office.

Rebekah shows a deep understanding of the importance of counterspaces and thus has ensured to build one for this new colleague.

These experiences align with scholarship showing that counterspaces are not only supportive retreats but also sites of cultural affirmation, collective learning, and empowerment, where participants engage in critical dialogue and transform marginalization into leadership development (Nagda & Roper, 2019; Poon, 2023).

Within the framework of Cariño Competences, counterspaces extend the model beyond individual action, illustrating a collective dimension of leadership resilience, empowerment, and well-being. By transforming experiences of inequity into growth, professional influence, and healing, these intentionally cultivated infrastructures advance both the theoretical understanding of Cariño Competence and practical strategies for sustaining equity-driven leadership in contexts historically structured for exclusion. They foster collegial sisterhood, enabling WOC to maintain persistence, agency, and professional development in challenging organizational climates.

Counterspaces function as strategic relational scaffolds that amplify resilience, cultivate empowerment, and foster healing, enabling WOC to translate experiences of marginalization into collective leadership capacity. These infrastructures demonstrate that sustaining culturally grounded, equity-driven leadership requires intentionally designed networks of mentorship, care, and advocacy—highlighting a critical, collective dimension of Cariño Competence.

5. Discussion: Advancing Culturally Grounded STEM Leadership Through Cariño Competence

The findings of this study offer a data-driven theorization of Cariño Competence, an analytic construct that captures how WOC leaders in STEM operationalize culturally grounded care as a strategic, protective, and resistive praxis. While traditional leadership paradigms often emphasize managerial efficiency and procedural compliance, Cariño Competence reframes leadership as both an identity-embedded and onto-epistemological practice (T. Kim & Ishimaru, 2025). By centering the lived experiences and cultural intuition of WOC and drawing on CFE (Delgado Bernal, 1998), this framework situates leadership within moral, relational, and community-grounded commitments, linking knowledge-making to both care and structural action. In line with CFE, leaders’ knowledge is shaped by lived experience, cultural intuition, and relational obligation, offering epistemic insight into navigating STEM spaces historically structured by whiteness and gendered norms (Delgado Bernal, 2020). This study contributes to how equity-oriented leaders navigate the liminal spaces (Martinez, 2025) between institutional mandates and community accountability. Next, the four dimensions of the Cariño Competence framework are summarized.

5.1. Relational Attunement

The first dimension of Cariño Competence, relational attunement, moves beyond abstract dispositions to establish students as the “moral anchor” for institutional decision-making. Leaders enacted an intentional orientation toward understanding and anticipating students’ lived realities—particularly the “STEM trauma” experienced by Students of Color. This aligns with CFE’s emphasis on embodied, situated knowledge: epistemology is inseparable from the leaders’ positionality and ethical commitments to their communities. It also resonates with the concept of the “equity walk” described by McNair et al. (2020), which requires foregrounding race-conscious interpretation and critical reflexivity as central leadership capacities. Through intentional listening and ethical self-interrogation, these leaders ensure that initiatives remain culturally sustaining and responsive to structural inequities, a praxis that mirrors E. Kim and Ishimaru’s (2025) call to center relational accountability in leadership.

5.2. Protective Action

Cariño Competence is further enacted through protective action, where leaders function as institutional safeguards against racialized harm. This dimension manifests in several interrelated strategies: (a) calling out dominant whiteness, (b) creating relationships with peers as a shield, (c) leveraging data as evidence, and (d) engaging in counter-surveillance. These practices align with CFE praxis, which emphasizes resistance and advocacy grounded in epistemic authority derived from marginalized positionalities. The protective strategies utilized by the leaders also demonstrate cultural intuition and that knowledge is mobilized for social transformation, translating culturally grounded insight into deliberate actions that mitigate institutional harm (Delgado Bernal, 2020). Consistent with racialized organizational theory (Ray, 2019), these leaders recognized that STEM institutions embed inequity within everyday norms. Consequently, protective action requires the strategic calibration of authority to buffer staff and students from institutional failure and the racist structures that treat equity as an afterthought, echoing Hall and Johnson’s (2025) observations of the heightened scrutiny faced by minoritized leaders.

5.3. Boundary-Setting

The third dimension, boundary-setting, represents a deliberate resistance to the extractive labor expectations that characterize many STEM leadership roles. Leaders asserted limits on their capacity as an ethical act of self-preservation, reframing the refusal of uncompensated labor not as inadequacy, but as principled leadership. This practice aligns with cariño, which frames such resistance as epistemically and morally legitimate labor, recognizing that maintaining boundaries is crucial to sustaining care for self and others that WOC perform within inequitable structures (Curry, 2021; Pearson et al., 2021; Valdez & Amoakoh, 2025). Boundary-setting also engages cultural taxation theory (Bensimon, 2018; Mahatmya et al., 2022), which explains the accumulation of disproportionate equity labor often borne by minoritized leaders. By interrupting the institutional assumption that personal endurance equals commitment, these leaders protect their long-term ability to support their communities and resist the burnout and physiological stress associated with racial battle fatigue (McGee et al., 2023), extending CFE’s emphasis on self-determined, community-aligned agency in leadership praxis.

5.4. Community-Sustained Resilience

Finally, the dimension of community-sustained resilience highlights the collective and relational nature of Cariño Competence, where counterspaces function as critical relational infrastructures. These “colega hoods” provided the emotional support, shared sense-making, and moral validation necessary to persist in exclusionary organizational climates. Mirroring CFE, this dimension foregrounds collective knowledge production and relational epistemologies, emphasizing that knowledge emerges within and through community rather than solely from individual expertise (Delgado Bernal, 1998). Counterspaces serve as both sites of protection and arenas of critical epistemic labor, enabling WOC to transform experiences of marginalization into leadership development, resilience, and collective empowerment (DeCuir-Gunby et al., 2020; Ong et al., 2018). By sustaining relational and epistemic networks, these spaces allow WOC to navigate microaggressions while maintaining focus on transformative, equity-driven goals, functioning as the epistemic infrastructures described by DeCuir-Gunby et al. (2020).

6. Implications

The emergence of Cariño Competence carries significant weight for both institutional development and future scholarly inquiry. The following sections outline how these findings can be translated into actionable policy changes to better support equity-oriented leaders within STEM higher education. Additionally, we propose directions for future research to further validate and expand the reach of this culturally grounded leadership model.

6.1. Policy Implications

We offer four recommendations to reform institutional policy. First, institutions should revise merit and annual review guidelines to explicitly value the invisible and unrecognized labor of relational attunement and protective action. This labor should be documented as high-level leadership expertise rather than being dismissed as “service” or “passion.” Next, rather than treating informal support networks as incidental, STEM institutions should formally resource and validate intentional counterspaces as essential professional infrastructures. These spaces function as critical sites for collective sense-making, mentorship, and the validation of embodied knowledge and should be resourced with dedicated funding, physical or digital space, and official recognition within leadership development frameworks. Furthermore, evaluation systems should move beyond quantifiable outputs to include “ethical reflexivity.” This includes using qualitative data and participant feedback to ensure programs are responsive to student realities rather than just procedural compliance. Finally, institutions must respect and protect the boundaries set by WOC leaders as a legitimate strategy for sustainability. Policies should ensure that leadership roles are adequately scoped and compensated to prevent the cultural taxation that leads to racial battle fatigue.

By adopting these recommendations, STEM institutions can begin to dismantle the oppressive structures that necessitate protective labor, creating an environment where Cariño Competence is not just a survival strategy, but a blueprint for organizational transformation.

6.2. Implications for Future Research

Future research should build upon the construct of Cariño Competence by addressing several critical areas of inquiry that extend beyond the current scope. First, while this study centered on the lived experiences and narratives of leaders, future investigations should incorporate the perspectives of the students and staff who are the recipients of this care to measure how relational attunement directly impacts their persistence and helps mitigate “STEM trauma.” Second, because these findings emerged from a federally funded STEM initiative at HSIs, researchers should explore how Cariño Competence is enacted in diverse institutional environments—such as predominantly white institutions (PWIs) or private industry—where protective action and counter-surveillance may encounter different levels of structural resistance. Finally, longitudinal research is needed to track whether the practice of boundary-setting and the cultivation of counterspaces effectively prevent long-term “racial battle fatigue” and burnout throughout a leader’s entire career trajectory. By examining these long-term outcomes, the field can better understand the conditions under which culturally grounded care serves as a truly sustainable scaffold for both individual resilience and institutional transformation.

In conclusion, the emergence of Cariño Competence challenges STEM institutions to move beyond performative equity and racialized, gendered practices and toward an identity-embedded leadership praxis that centers relational accountability and epistemic justice. This study demonstrates that for WOC, leadership is not a neutral set of skills, but a culturally grounded and theoretically informed response to racialized institutional contexts. Grounded in CFE, care, cultural intuition, and praxis, Cariño Competence highlights how lived experience and relational commitments function as legitimate sources of knowledge and leadership practice, rather than peripheral or informal contributions. To sustain this vital work, STEM organizations must move from individualizing resilience to restructuring institutional environments that currently depend on it.