Racial diversity in water leadership

Long ignored, racial and ethnic diversity are now high priorities for the water sector.* Diversity is especially important in leadership posts, as top executives set priorities for their organizations and in many ways are the public faces of their utilities. Journal AWWA’s February 2025 cover story features profiles of seven African American water executives, including the venerable organization’s current president. This post brings data to the party.**

Back in 2011, I led a national study of American water utility chief executive officers (CEOs) that found—perhaps unsurprisingly—that these organizations’ leaders were overwhelmingly white, non-Hispanic men. Twelve years later, Wisconsin PhD student Natalie Smith and I followed up, gathering demographic, educational, and professional background data on water utility executives, thanks to support from Spring Point Partners. Armed with these new data on more than a thousand community water systems’ CEOs, Natalie and I are exploring diversity among water utilities’ top leaders. A pair of earlier posts looked at gender representation and compared men’s and women’s career paths.

The data that we gathered offer an uncommonly accurate look at diversity in the water sector’s executive ranks. What is the racial composition of water utilities’ executive ranks? Are water CEOs more diverse today than they were a decade ago? Where are Black and other minority CEOs most likely to lead water systems?

To the data!

More drops in the bucket

Having spent nearly three decades working in the water sector, I’ve been around long enough to see a rainbow of color slowly emerging in the profession. Until recently, members of racial and ethnic minorities were a vanishingly small fraction of water sector executives. Our 2011 study found that America’s water CEOs were 96% white and/ non-Hispanic. Indeed, back then there were so few non-white CEOs that it was impossible to analyze correlates of executive race or ethnicity with any kind of statistical validity.

Although these are still small shares relative to the broader U.S. population, the progress is undeniable: minority representation in the water sector’s executive ranks has more than tripled since 2011. For context, that’s less racial/ethnic diversity than we see among city managers, police chiefs, and school superintendents, but much more diverse than the Fortune 500. The diversity we see in water is roughly comparable to executive diversity in the energy sector. 

Happily, water executives are now sufficiently diverse to allow for comparative analysis of minority CEOs’ organizations and career paths. Minority executives aren’t distributed randomly across the water sector; the picture that emerges is intuitive in some ways and surprising in others.

Once again, size matters

The smallest utilities in our sample, serving populations of around 25,000, have a roughly 10% chance of having a minority CEO and 3% chance of a Black CEO. Those probabilities climb to 17% and 10%, respectively, for a utility that serves a population of 500,000.

Ideology, too

Local politics seems to affect the likelihood of minority water utility CEOs, too. We matched water systems to a survey-based measure of local political ideology widely used by political scientists. This scale measures the dominant ideological leanings of the local electorate on a scale from -1.0 (liberal) to +1.0 (conservative), with moderates scored zero. On this scale, Honolulu, HI scores a liberal -.37, while Mesa, AZ is a conservative +.41.

Sector and representation

One more fascinating pattern that emerged from the data is a surprising difference in CEO race by utility organizational model. Historically, local government agencies have offered important employment opportunities and paths to professional advancement for racial/ethnic minorities in the United States, and for Black leaders specifically. For that reason, we might expect Black CEOs to be most common in municipal utilities. All seven Black executives profiled in the recent Journal AWWA article lead public sector organizations, consistent with that expectation.

Contrary to expectations, investor-owned water systems are more likely than municipal systems to have Black CEOs. We don’t see this pattern for other racial/ethnic minorities, and it’s the opposite from what we see with gender. This finding indicates that the private sector offers important opportunities for Black water professionals, and that Black leaders like Larry Carson, Robert Davis, and Randy Moore deserve recognition alongside their public sector peers.

Uneven progress

The American water sector’s executive ranks are far less diverse than the American population, but the progress toward representative diversity is clear: today’s water CEOs are far more racially and ethnically diverse than they were in the past. Water sector organizations and pioneering minority leaders who have worked hard to blaze trails ought to be proud of that progress. The important question looking ahead is whether this progress will continue. The findings here indicate that further gains will depend in part on diversifying leadership in smaller systems and more conservative communities.

Future posts will show that paths to the corner office look quite different for water leaders of different races—with insights that can help develop future generations of leaders.

*See for example AWWA, AMWA, WEF, and NACWA.

**Just under the wire to post during Black History Month!

†FWIW, we didn’t find any correlation between local ideology and CEO gender.