The PA and EA world is small, smaller than most people outside it realise. Everyone is a few connections away from everyone else, reputations travel fast, and a huge amount of how this industry actually works, who gets recommended for a role, who gets invited into a network, who gets trusted with a principal’s inbox, runs on relationships rather than job titles. That makes it a profession built almost entirely on trust and discretion.
This is exactly why culture matters so much, and why we are not honest enough about it. We talk endlessly about culture fit when we’re hiring or searching for a new role but we talk almost never about culture harm: the stuff that happens in WhatsApp groups, private forums and side conversations between people who are meant to be colleagues or network peers in the loosest sense of the word. Everybody in this industry has felt it, or watched it happen to someone else.
If assistants are fighting, rightly, to be recognised as strategic operators rather than “just admin,” we cannot build that credibility while tolerating rooms where women tear other women down for entertainment. Leadership in this industry isn’t only what happens with your principal, it’s what you tolerate in the group chat.
The double standard we need to name
There’s a version of this conversation that only ever talks about toxic behaviour as something done to assistants by difficult clients or bad employers. That’s the easier story, it’s also incomplete.
Some of the most corrosive behaviour I’ve seen in this industry has come from assistants, aimed at other assistants or people in general. Gossip about someone’s client or employer framed as “just looking out for the community.” Screenshots shared for a laugh, mockery dressed up as banter, silence when someone says something unkind, because staying quiet is easier than being the one who interrupts it. Whole conversations where one person becomes the entertainment for everyone else in the group.
None of that is culture. It’s insecurity with an audience, and every senior assistant, community leader or network owner who watches it happen and says nothing is choosing what kind of standard they’re setting.
What it actually costs
In an industry where trust and discretion are the entire product, this behaviour is not a minor issue. It costs the people on the receiving end their confidence in spaces that are supposed to be professional support networks. It costs the industry talented people, because the assistants with the most self respect are often the first to step back from communities that don’t deserve them. And it costs the people doing it far more than they realise, because in a small industry, reputations for pettiness follow you. Nobody remembers who was mocked in a forum two years from now but people do remember who they can trust in a room.
Step one: know what to look out for
Toxic behaviour in this industry rarely looks dramatic. It tends to look like:
- Screenshots or messages from a private conversation being shared or forwarded, without consent, for reaction or amusement.
- A colleague’s client, employer or specific work situation being discussed in a group setting by people who have no context and no need to know.
- Someone being consistently left out of introductions, opportunities or invitations, with no explanation and no acknowledgement.
- A pile on, where one unkind comment gets a wave of laughing reactions or agreement, and nobody breaks from the group to say otherwise.
- Gossip that is framed as concern or as “protecting the community,” but that serves no purpose except to make someone smaller.
- Someone’s mistake, hard client, career gap or personal circumstance being used as a recurring joke rather than treated with basic discretion.
- One person’s competence being consistently undermined or questioned in group settings, in a way that wouldn’t happen if they were in the room.
Step two: know the gray areas
This is where it gets harder, because not everything uncomfortable is toxic, and not everything toxic feels obviously wrong in the moment. A few useful distinctions:
- Honest feedback about someone’s work, given directly to them or through a proper channel, is not the same as mocking that work in a space where they can’t respond. The first builds people, the second only entertains everyone but them.
- Venting privately to one trusted person about a difficult client or a hard day is a normal, healthy release. Airing that same frustration in a group forum full of people who don’t know the context, and who may spread it further, is not venting anymore. It’s exposure.
- Not clicking with someone personally is completely normal, and you don’t owe anyone friendship. Actively excluding them from professional opportunities, introductions or events because you don’t personally like them is a different thing entirely, and it has real career consequences for them.
- Healthy competition for a role or a client is part of any industry. Deliberately undermining someone’s reputation or candidacy behind their back so you look better by comparison is not competition. It’s sabotage.
- Setting a boundary with someone, choosing not to engage, stepping back from a group, is healthy and something everyone is entitled to do without justifying it. Freezing someone out as a form of punishment or social control is not a boundary. It’s a power play.
- A joke that works because it’s mutual, consented to and would land the same way if the other person told it about you, is banter. A joke that only works because it’s at someone’s expense, and would never be said to their face, isn’t banter. It’s cruelty with better PR.
If you’re ever unsure which side of the line something falls on, there’s a simple test. Would you say it, in the same words and the same tone, directly to that person, in a room with your name on the door? If the honest answer is no, that’s usually the tell.
Step three: know what to actually do about it
If you’re a bystander watching it happen, the smallest useful step is to stop participating. Don’t like the comment, don’t add the laughing reaction, don’t say nothing and let your silence read as agreement. Where you can, a private message to the person being targeted goes further than people expect, and a quiet, direct word to whoever is driving the conversation is often more effective than a public confrontation.
If you’re the one being targeted, resist the urge to defend yourself inside the same forum where it’s happening. It rarely changes the outcome and often gives the behaviour more fuel. Document what’s been said if you think you may need to raise it formally and talk to someone you trust who isn’t part of the situation. Give yourself honest permission to ask whether this is a space worth staying in at all, access to a group is not the same as value from it.
If you lead a team, a community or a network, the standard is set by what you’re willing to allow, not by what you say you believe in. That means being explicit about expectations in the spaces you run, being willing to remove people who consistently breach them, and being the person who models the behaviour you want to see rather than the person who laughs along because it’s easier in the moment.
And for everyone, the longer term move is the same. Build your professional reputation through the quality of your actual work and the relationships you handle with real discretion, not through visibility in industry chatter. Reputations built on undermining other people don’t last, because there’s nothing underneath them to hold them up. Reputations built on competence and character compound, consistently, for years.
The standard we should be setting
If this industry wants to keep making the case that assistants are strategic, trusted, senior professionals rather than an afterthought, the culture inside our own community has to reflect that ambition. That means calling out unkindness even when it’s coming from someone in our own circle. It means building spaces where newer or more junior assistants feel safe enough to speak up, rather than powerless enough to stay quiet and hope it isn’t their turn next. It means recognising that how we treat each other when no client or employer is watching says just as much about our professionalism as anything on our CV.
Build something worth being known for, don’t spend your career being known for who you talked about.
