There are currently 56 Black women full professors in UK (Updated 13 Feb, 2023)
In 2019, Prof. Nicola Rollock produced a ground-breaking report (click this link to read it - here) that showed there were just 25 Black women professors in UK. The report also detailed their experiences and strategies to stay in academia in the presence of institutional, systemic, overt and covert racism.
After reading that report in 2021, I developed an interest in tracking how many Black women professors there were in UK. This was initially out of curiosity to loudly celebrate the very few Black women who were reaching this academic milestone. It has now blossomed into a community activity as many other women in or affiliated to academia are equally keen to watch the development of this list and actively contribute to the data accuracy by informing of promotions that they are aware of. This is important as HESA which officially keeps this data does not disaggregate Black professors by gender. HESA lists the total number of Black professors and a percentage of how many professors in total (all ethnicities) identify as women but not directly how many Black women professors there are in UK. I heard a speaker at a conference say, 'We measure what we value.' This is why we as a community maintain this list, it is of value, to us.
An additional final note is that there are currently over 23,000 professors in UK (22,855 at the 2020/2021 HESA Survey)
Who is on the list
The list contains women who have identified themselves as Black and hold a full professor title in a UK University. Each name is verified by a live link to the corresponding University webpage that clearly names the person and that they are a full professor. This list is not public. There is a partial list that contains many although not all of the 56 Black women that is maintained by Prof. Iyiola Solanke.