Black Accountants' Pursuit of Partnership

ABSTRACT Recent AICPA surveys indicate disproportionate attrition among Black professionals attaining partnership in US public accounting firms, underscoring the need to better understand their experiences. Despite repeated calls for examination, understanding of these experiences remains limited, partly due to the difficulty in accessing the few Black partners in public accounting. To address this gap in the literature, we interview 26 Black professionals (20 partners and 6 aspirants) to explore how they navigate their journey to partnership in predominantly White firms. We identify three key milestones necessary for partnership: finding mentors who provide honest feedback, gaining career‐building experiences, and being seen as a culturally legitimate leader who aligns with organizational norms. By recalibrating their practices, Black professionals achieve partnership by decoding unwritten rules of the organization to build relationships with decision‐makers, obtain developmental feedback, access challenging assignments, and carefully balance the organization's cultural fit requirements with their personal identity. While these practices help some professionals reach partnership, the path remains uncertain, emotionally taxing, and often shaped by sponsorship, timing, and luck. Our findings suggest that firms can streamline the path to partnership by formalizing mentoring and sponsorship, distributing candid feedback and high‐visibility assignments more equitably, and making promotion criteria transparent—so that advancement depends less on luck and on the ability to decode unwritten rules. More broadly, our findings indicate that lasting change rests with organizations reshaping these conditions, rather than with individuals' efforts alone.