In the tech industry, one way we often justify the existence of an asshole in an organization is by denoting them as an "equal opportunity" asshole (EOA). Meaning, they aren't just a jerk to women or people of color, they're a jerk to everybody. So that means everyone suffers equally and the EOA is not a problem for diversity in your organization, right?
Wrong. Even if your EOA mistreats everyone equally, your employees from underrepresented minorities (URMs) are still going to be disproportionately harmed by it. What follows is an examination of this dynamic in the context of engineering management. I'm currently an engineering manager and have been for over five years, so being a manager from an URM I've run into this a fair bit in the past and have had lots of time to think about it.
Engineering management, especially the modern version that asserts "management is not a promotion!", is like US Dollars. The system only works so long as everyone believes in it. Much like there's no longer actual gold being stockpiled to give your dollars meaning, there's no actual requirement that you have to work well with or listen to your manager. "But if I don’t work well with my manager, I could get fired!", you may sensibly object. In practice, however, firing someone is often difficult. A front-line manager may be undercut by their director or VP or even HR in attempting to remove a problematic member of their team. And simply "being difficult" is not enough reason to fire someone.
But an engineer being persistently obstructionist can undercut an otherwise healthy relationship between a team and its engineering manager. Building well-functioning, high-performing teams and organizations is all about embedding healthy tensions within the group. Take for example the usual tensions between Engineering and Product. Product wants to continually ship new value to customers, while Engineering wants to make sure what they're building isn't going to break or make life harder for themselves in the future. Both of these are valid sides, and the best way forward often lies somewhere in the middle. A healthy tension between the two groups ensures a middle ground is reached. But if one side pushes back too much and refuses to hear or trust the experience of the other, you'll miss out on the middle ground to which these opposing voices were supposed to get us. Instead you'll end up with unbalanced solutions that are too far to one side or the other.
It's much the same with the tension between individual contributor (IC) engineering and engineering management. Individual contributors want to stay heads down and enjoy solid chunks of focus time. Engineering managers want to protect heads down time but also recognize the need for collaboration to ship a good product. Same as before, the best way forward is somewhere in the middle. You should have neither process for the sake of process, nor should you have no process at all. You should have just enough. This means managers should listen to input from their engineers on the impact of their decisions, and engineers should voice their concerns but also not push back on every single decision that doesn't go their way.
Which brings us back to the myth of the "equal opportunity" asshole. Let's assume there is a maximum threshold of pushback that an engineering manager can sustain before it becomes impossible for them to do their job effectively. Let's also suppose that the amount of pushback that creates a healthy tension between IC engineering and engineering management, a desirable amount of pushback, is somewhere well below that threshold:
Graph showing equal height bars for pushback total (y-axis) for both URM and non-URM managers. Both bars below “unable to do job” threshold.
But this isn't quite what everyday reality looks like. Even when there are no assholes in your org, your URM managers still encounter more pushback than your non-URM managers, simply due to the pervasive nature of unconscious bias. Statistically, in aggregate, people listen to ideas from URM a bit less often. [1] And when you're a manager, that day-to-day accumulation puts you already a bit closer to the "unable to do my job" threshold:
Same graph as above, but with addition of bias in pushback total for URM manager. URM manager bar is higher, but both are still below threshold.
Now consider the supposed EOA. This person may push back on both the URM and non-URM manager in equal amounts, but consider the difference in impact between the URM and non-URM manager:
Same graph now with “EOA” addition to both bars. URM bar is higher and has been pushed above “ability to do job” threshold. Non-URM bar also has EOA addition but is still below threshold.
While your EOA may push back on both managers, they have only pushed one manager over the "unable to do my job" threshold. Their impact is not equal opportunity after all! This is a huge problem, doubly so because of the common blind spot: in choosing to focus on the origin of the behavior, you will miss the effect of it--your managers from URMs will leave (or be pushed out of) their roles at higher rates than your non-URM managers. It's then no wonder that we see even worse representation of URMs in senior leadership than in other roles. For example, did you know that while women account for 44% of the overall S&P 500 labor force, they are only 25% of executive- and senior-level officials and managers? Even worse, only 20% hold board seats, and a dismal 6% are CEOs. [2]
The real bummer of this is that your URM managers will not be able to fix this themselves, by virtue of having been pushed above the "unable to do my job" threshold. Their hands are likely tied--they can't coach team members that refuse to accept them as a coach, and they can’t change team members that refuse to hear they have much to change. And so the URM manager may reach out for help from others, but hear "well this person is difficult with everyone, not just you!", which doesn't do anything to solve the problem. The URM manager remains pushed above the "unable to do my job" threshold, and the organization continues on oblivious to the fact that they have a brewing diversity and inclusion problem on their hands.
So, how to fix this? If you're an engineer, be thoughtful in how and how much you push back on things you disagree with. Especially when your manager is from an URM--they are almost certainly underestimated all the time already. Disagreeing with them slightly less than you'd normally be inclined to is probably just accounting for your own unconscious bias, or at least making up for others'. I'm not saying blindly trust your manager on everything, I'm just saying consider turning the dial a few small degrees in favor of pushing back on their ideas a bit less. Get curious instead of combative.
If you're in a senior leadership position, you're in a great position to work to fix this common problem! First, remove the idea of an EOA from your diagnostic toolkit. Second, let your managers know they have your full support in finding peer support to coach problematic team members, or in removing team members who refuse to be coached. Make sure they know you understand that the problem of assholes impacts URM and non-URM managers differently.
One last side note: it may be that your EOA is only "equal opportunity" so long as URMs are not in a position of power over them. This can be especially problematic for women managers, as the gendered stereotype of women as "nags" is deeply embedded in our society. Much like the faction of men who seem to only be able to relate to feminism through their daughters, your EOA may only be "equal opportunity" so long as their women coworkers are unthreatening and unimposing. They may in fact be a more pronounced asshole to women managers than they are to their women peers. So, pointing to how an asshole treats their engineer peers is not always helpful in understanding how they process relationships with people to which they report.
Simply put: "equal opportunity" assholes do not exist. Believing in this fictitious concept will blind you to the disproportionate impact on URM employees, and is useless in practice anyway as it provides no actionable insights. If instead your organization correctly views the existence of assholes (even minor, accidental ones!) as a problem worth solving, then everyone will be better off for it, and your organization will have patched one of the many holes causing URMs to leave or be pushed out at higher rates than your non-URM employees.