Power games and a debunked theory

The trigger

It all started with an excellent post by Oa Metzner in her Facebook profile. She described her experience so far in the role of leader and urged men to be careful with the power they have and how they use it. I reposted her text and I also followed the comments on her post. I had different discussions with friends and there are so many points to unpac from al this desiussion that one post is not enough. In this post I am going to explain how the gender imbalance creates a mismatch in communities and try to see how true is the argument that women have power to from a community through rejection.

It’s all about supply and demand

If there is one law that most of us are familiar with, it is the law of supply and demand. Simply put, the price (not the value) of a product is defined in a market based on its supply and demand. The bigger the supply the lower the price gets and the lower the supply the higher the price gets. Similarly the bigger the demand is the higher the price gets and the lower the demand is the lower the price gets.

For many reasons, which I am not going to discuss here, most communities have more women than men. Therefore more followers than leaders. I know… I am assuming gender-based roles for simplicity’s sake, plus because this is the reality in most cases. So if we look at the side of the leaders as a market then you can see that there is low supply and high demand. Therefore, it is inevitable that their price will go up. That means that a follower, to dance with a leader, needs to be able and offer a good amount of “dance” (the quality of the dance in this case is used as a kind of currency) in return. Which in turn leads to followers trying hard to develop their skills to meet the high price they need to pay.

On the other side, you have the followers market being the exact opposite. A market with high supply and low demand. This means that the price of followers goes down. So the leaders don’t need to pay a high price in “dance” which means that there is no real need to develop and grow their Tango. A mediocre set of skills would be just enough for any leader who wants to go to a milonga and dance.

The power that nobody wants

Oa’s text is pointing exactly to the issue created by this mismatch. Women usually know and acknowledge this power of men. You can see it in any registration process for a Tango event. There is almost always a waiting list for followers and more leaders are always wanted. This gives men power. Power to choose… Power to upsell their value… Power to even abuse their advantageous position.

However, in many discussions with men in Tango, you can hear the opposite argument. Many people (mostly men) would support the idea that women have the power in Tango because they are the ones who have the last word to accept or reject an invitation. This way, by rejecting bad leaders they can form the community the way they want it. They can force leaders to become better and pay a good amount of “dance” to dance with them and therefore mitigate the upselling that I mentioned earlier.

As a general pattern, I see that nobody acknowledges the power they have but they easily see the power others have. Men usually see women as powerful while women see men as powerful but rarely would you see a man or a woman acknowledging their power. Somehow we understand that if we acknowledge our power, if we accept it, we should also accept the responsibility that comes with it and nobody wants to be loaded with responsibilities. But for the time being, let’s leave this can of worms closed.

Testing the hypothesis

There are many things to unpack from the two points of view in terms of who has power and what kind of power but in this post, I will focus on the perceived power of women as often identified by men. I have heard this argument even from my teacher in my first steps in Tango and I always took it as a given. I always thought that since it comes from an experienced dancer’s lips, it must be true. I never questioned it until I sat down and created a simple thought experiment to see how it would work in pracitce. Follow me.

Let’s see a practical example with some close-to-reality (I hope) numbers. Let’s assume that in an average community, about 60% of the dancers are female and 40% male. Let’s also assume for simplicity’s sake that most males are leaders and most females are followers. Because of the competition on the followers’ side as analysed before, let’s assume that about 30% of the followers are top-level dancers and only 5% of leaders are top-level (again because leaders don’t see a big motivation to improve). Let’s assume now that women use their power of rejection and indeed this 30% of top female dancers reject men (don’t get to dance as much in the process) and manage to force another 20% of those men to get better. In the end, you end up with a community where 18% (60%*30%) of it is good followers and 10% (40%*25%) of it is good leaders. How does this look? Is the followers’ problem really solved? I wouldn’t say so! The top-level followers still outnumber almost by 2 to 1 the top-level leaders. Of course, the situation is better than before but it’s far away from ideal. If we wanted an equal percentage of dancers in both roles on the top level we would need to force almost 50% (50%*40%=20%) of leaders to become top-level which goes far beyond the normal distribution that you encounter in most skills. Even the 30% mentioned for women is already far enough from the normal distribution, 50% is really too much.

Practical problems

Given the aforementioned analysis, we can see two main problems with the argument that women have the power to shape a good community by raising their expectations and rejecting mediocre leaders. The first is what you saw in the numbers. The fact that more leaders will become better does not solve the mismatch in numbers. Those few good leaders will still be too few to satisfy the good followers and support the rest of the community. Therefore the return on investment of such a strategy for followers is very low to make it worth it.

The second problem is that, to apply such a strategy you need all (or at least most of) good followers to agree and follow it. If some follow the approach of rejection while others do not then the ones following the approach risk being labelled as snobs and the others will profit from the increased opportunities that will arise from the rejections of the other group.

That is why I believe that the power of women as often presented (usually by men) is more or less a fake power. An illusion of power. A myth! In reality, this power is both very impractical to use and really inefficient in terms of the result it may produce.

Let’s Co-Create

When is the power effective?

There is a case where such a strategy could be beneficial for the community. If the community had an almost equal distribution between men and women but a bigger percentage of followers were on the top level then the rejections could indeed convince leaders to become better and reach a similar percentage of top-level leaders.

But then again… in a community of equal distribution, the supply and demand from both sides would be similar and competition in both roles would also be similar. This means that the mismatch described earlier will probably not exist in the first place. Therefore, the strategy is not really necessary in this case.

Women power debunked

Where does this leave us? As demonstrated in the examples it is obvious that the argument that women have the power to form a community if they reject leaders and therefore push them to get better is an argument that seems logical but in practice it is impractical. In theory, it sounds perfect. However, given the specifics of today’s gender and role distribution in the dance, the application of such a theory in practice seems to bring really insignificant results. Moreover, in an ideal community of equal distribution the reasons to apply such a strategy are extinct and therefore the whole women’s power theory is just a theory without a need for application.

Tonight’s Goodnight Tango

Tonight’s Goodnight Tango is a song reminiscing of the old times. Times where in Buenos Aires the men were outnumbering women by far and they even fought between them to get to a woman’s heart. Isn’t it ironic? This dance started in a city at a time when the gender imbalance was too many men for too few women and after being globalized it ended up with the exact opposite gender imbalance in the various Tango communities over the world. Who knows… maybe Tango and gender imbalance need to go hand in hand!

So how about you? Do you believe that women have power to from a community through rejection? Have you ever thought if this works in reality? Have you ever seen this work in reality? Let me know…

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