Why This Nurse Hasn’t Renewed Her Sigma Membership Yet (Opinion)

Editor’s note: The author is a current Sigma Nursing member and reported Nurse.org’s earlier news coverage of this story.

My Sigma Nursing membership is up for renewal.

The reminder landed in my inbox on September 17. Ordinarily, I probably wouldn’t have given it much thought. Renew. Pay the fee. Move on.

Except this time, I stopped.

Just one day earlier, I had received a very different email from Sigma.

“We sincerely apologize for not communicating with you sooner,” Sigma President Liz Westcott wrote on behalf of the Board of Directors, addressing members after allegations involving CEO Luke Davis had erupted publicly.

Sigma acknowledged the “frustration, hurt, and questions” members were experiencing. It promised accountability. It thanked the members and volunteers who had spoken up and asked difficult questions. And it reminded us, again, of the three words Sigma has returned to throughout this controversy:

Love. Courage. Honor.

Twenty-four hours later, my renewal reminder arrived.

I realize that email was almost certainly part of the ordinary automated machinery of running a membership organization. But the timing made the question impossible for me to ignore:

Do I want to renew?

Want to see more Nurse.org articles in your Google results? Add us as a preferred source.

At the time that renewal notice arrived, Davis was on paid administrative leave while Sigma reviewed communications attributed to him. Sigma said it had not authenticated the communications, while also condemning the racist and dehumanizing language attributed to them and stating that such language has no place within the organization.

Then, on September 18, the situation changed again. Sigma stated that as of that date, Davis is no longer with the organization.

Importantly, Sigma had promised members in its September 16 email that another update would come by 3 p.m. ET on September 18.

It delivered one.

That deserves to be acknowledged.

As of this publication, Sigma had not posted on Instagram since that announcement.

But my hesitation about renewing was never entirely about one CEO.

I want to know what membership in an organization that promises love, courage, honor, belonging, diversity, and leadership actually means when those values are tested.

And increasingly, I’m wondering whether that is really a question about Sigma or whether it is a question the nursing field needs to ask itself.

Before deciding whether to renew, I wanted to separate my emotional reaction to the current controversy from a more objective question:

What does Sigma actually do with the influence, money, and membership entrusted to it?

There is plenty of good to point to.

Sigma reports more than 100,000 active members, with more than 600 chapters and members in more than 100 countries. Its reach is enormous.

Through the Sigma Foundation for Nursing and partnerships with other nursing organizations, Sigma funds nursing research, leadership development, membership assistance, and other programs. Its current grant portfolio includes partnerships with organizations such as the Emergency Nurses Association Foundation, National League for Nursing, Midwest Nursing Research Society, Southern Nursing Research Society, and National Association of Hispanic Nurses.

Some of those efforts are explicitly focused on populations that have historically been underserved.

Sigma’s collaborative grant with the National Association of Hispanic Nurses, for example, provides up to $5,000 annually for research advancing Latino health.

Sigma’s own small-grant program offers 10 to 15 grants of up to $5,000 each year and specifically states that research involving marginalized populations is “strongly encouraged” and will receive preference when other qualifications are equal.

The work being funded reflects some of that mission as well. Among Sigma’s 2025 grant recipients are projects examining barriers to breast cancer care among underserved Chinese American women, mental health among Latina immigrant women, weight management among minority ethnic women, the experiences of LGBTQ+ veterans, and healthcare needs in countries from Ghana and South Africa to Malaysia and Timor-Leste.

That matters. It would be unfair to discuss Sigma’s record without acknowledging it.

But while researching this article, I kept running into another question.

Not how many members it has.

Not how many countries it reaches.

Not how many chapters carry its name.

Who are the nurses inside it?

Sigma can tell us that more than 100,000 active members live in more than 100 countries. It can tell us where its hundreds of chapters are located. Its website publishes the names and research projects of grant recipients and extensive information about its programs.

What I have not been able to locate publicly is something much more basic: a comprehensive demographic breakdown of Sigma’s membership by race and ethnicity.

That absence makes some of the questions raised by the current controversy difficult to answer.

What percentage of Sigma’s U.S. membership is Black? What percentage of its applicants for grants, leadership opportunities, and international awards are Black, and what percentage of the recipients are? What has that representation looked like over time? How well are Black nurses represented in chapter leadership, committees, international leadership, and the other places within Sigma where decisions are made?

Those questions cannot responsibly be answered by looking at photographs or surnames and attempting to assign a race to people.

They require data.

If you’ve read my work before, you probably know I come back to the same principle again and again:

You can’t fix what you don’t know.

That is why data transparency matters.

We cannot identify disparities, measure progress, or hold organizations accountable without knowing where we are starting. If Sigma wants to demonstrate that its commitments to diversity, equity, belonging, and leadership are reaching the nurses it represents, the data should help tell that story.

And if the data shows gaps, that matters too.

The point of transparency isn’t to prove that an organization is perfect. It’s to give it, and its members, the information needed to make it better.

I asked Sigma directly. Kim Jones of Willow Marketing, which represents Sigma, said members can choose to share their race and ethnicity when they join, but it is not required, so the data Sigma has “is incomplete and does not give a full picture of our membership.” Sigma’s grant application does not ask about race or ethnicity, and the organization does not track it for applicants or recipients; it tracks each recipient’s country. The only demographic information Sigma shares publicly, Jones said, is the countries its members come from, in part because the race and ethnicity data is self-reported, optional and incomplete, and in part “to protect the privacy of the members who chose to provide it.” Sigma did not address my questions about leadership and governance positions.

There is also an important distinction between funding research about marginalized communities and ensuring that nurses from marginalized communities have equitable access to power within the organization funding it.

One does not necessarily prove the other.

Sigma’s Foundation says its research and project grants reflect a commitment to equity and inclusion and points specifically to grants supporting marginalized populations and nurses in regions where research funding is scarce.

That is meaningful.

But in this moment, members should be able to ask what equity looks like inside Sigma, too.

Who advances? Who receives opportunities? Who sits at the tables where decisions are made? Who feels comfortable disagreeing with leadership? When someone raises concerns about a powerful person, what happens next?

And perhaps most importantly after the allegations that brought us here:

Who feels like Sigma belongs to them?

I don’t yet know the answers.

That may be the point.

An organization whose mission is developing nurse leaders around the world should not be afraid of those questions. And members shouldn’t be afraid to ask them.

>>Listen to The Latest Nurse News Podcast

The longer I considered whether to renew my Sigma membership, the more I realized my hesitation wasn’t entirely about Sigma.

Some of it was about nursing.

Of course, bullying, retaliation, favoritism, cliques, and bad leadership aren’t exclusive to nurses. They exist in offices, restaurants, schools, construction sites, mechanic shops, and probably every other workplace.

So why have phrases like “nurses eat their young” become so deeply associated with our profession?

The research suggests the answer is more complicated than nurses simply being unkind to one another.

Studies examining bullying and horizontal violence in nursing repeatedly point to organizational factors: rigid hierarchies, poor leadership, high workloads, understaffing, workplace stress, power imbalances, informal alliances, and cultures where harmful behavior can become normalized or go unreported.

Nursing also has an unusual relationship with power.

Nurses carry enormous responsibility. We administer medications that can kill someone if given incorrectly. We identify deteriorating patients. We catch medical errors. We advocate for patients who cannot advocate for themselves.

Yet nurses often work within systems where they have limited authority over staffing, resources, institutional policy, and many of the conditions under which that responsibility is carried out.

Researchers have been writing about that contradiction for decades. Nursing literature has examined whether professional hierarchy and historically limited power contribute to what has been called “horizontal” or “lateral” violence: conflict directed toward colleagues rather than toward the systems or power structures creating the pressure.

That theory does not explain every instance of bullying in nursing, and some researchers have cautioned against using it as an explanation for everything. Bullying is ultimately an organizational problem that exists well beyond nursing.

But nursing adds another complication that an ordinary workplace often does not have:

There is a patient in the middle of it.

When communication breaks down in an office, a project may suffer.

When nurses are afraid to question someone, ask for help, report a mistake, or challenge a decision, the consequences can extend beyond employee morale.

Research has linked workplace incivility in healthcare with patient-safety culture and patient outcomes.

That is what makes nursing culture different.

We work in an environment where speaking up is not simply encouraged; it is supposed to be part of our professional responsibility.

Question the medication.

Challenge the unsafe assignment.

Report the error.

Escalate the deteriorating patient.

Advocate when something isn’t right.

And yet nursing continues to struggle with workplace cultures that can make doing exactly that socially or professionally costly.

And those experiences are not necessarily equal for every nurse.

A 2021 national survey conducted by the National Commission to Address Racism in Nursing found that 63% of the 5,623 nurses surveyed reported personally experiencing racism in the workplace. Among Black nurses surveyed, that figure was 92%. Three-quarters of respondents reported witnessing racism at work, and among nurses who challenged racist treatment, 64% said their efforts resulted in no change.

Those numbers matter here.

The broader problems of hierarchy, bullying, retaliation, and silence in nursing do not erase the racial issues at the center of the current Sigma controversy. For some nurses, race can add another layer to an already complicated professional culture.

That contradiction is difficult to ignore.

It also makes our professional organizations especially important.

Organizations like Sigma don’t just represent nurses. They help define what nursing leadership is supposed to look like.

They give awards. Fund research. Develop leaders. Create professional networks. Decide whose work gets elevated.

And, perhaps most importantly, they model the professional culture we tell the next generation of nurses they should aspire to.

So when an organization built around nursing leadership finds itself confronting serious questions about its own leadership, members should ask difficult questions.

Not because Sigma is necessarily worse than nursing.

But because an organization dedicated to developing nurse leaders should be helping us become better.

Sigma has chosen to position itself as one of the institutions that develops nursing’s leaders.

That gives it a higher responsibility to demonstrate the culture we’re trying to build.

My Sigma renewal reminder is still sitting in my inbox.

I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do with it.

Since it arrived, Sigma has acted. Davis is no longer with the organization, and Sigma delivered the member update it promised.

That matters, and Sigma deserves credit for it.

Sigma also does meaningful work. It funds nursing research, develops leaders, supports nurses internationally, and has built a professional network that reaches more than 100 countries.

But membership is more than a list of benefits. It is also a decision about the organizations we choose to belong to.

Sigma told its members that Love, Courage, and Honor “matter most when they are tested” and that those values must be demonstrated through actions, not simply stated. That language appears in the member communication I received directly from Sigma.

I agree.

Now I want to see what comes after the test.

Transparency. Measurable accountability. And evidence that the nurses represented by Sigma can see themselves not only in its mission, but in its membership, opportunities, and leadership.

You can’t fix what you don’t know.

And you can’t measure progress without showing where you started.

My renewal reminder is still there.

So am I.

I’m watching what Sigma does next.

Then I’ll decide whether to renew.

🤔 What would help you decide whether to renew your membership? Share your thoughts in the comments below.