The ladder

What I missed

The comment section of my last post taught me something I hadn’t fully seen when I was writing it.

Several female leaders pushed back. Not on the conclusion, but on the framing. They pointed out that the advantages I described… the existing network, the lower intimidation threshold, the familiarity with the follower’s experience… don’t tell the whole story. Because behind those advantages is a struggle I hadn’t made visible. Female leaders, especially in traditional milonga settings, are frequently invisible. Not because they aren’t there. Because the room doesn’t see them the same way it sees a male leader. The cabeceo that works for him doesn’t always work for her. The invitation that lands for him gets missed or misread when it comes from her. In events where time is short and competition is high, that invisibility becomes urgent.

So they find workarounds. They rely on existing friendships. They dance within their own circle. They cultivate visibility through social strategies that bypass the formal structure of the milonga. Not because they are trying to gain an unfair advantage. Because the formal structure wasn’t built with them in mind.

And here is where the two experiences meet. What female leaders developed as a survival tactic… male leaders experience as an uneven playing field. Both observations are true. They are not contradictory. They are two sides of the same structural problem.

But understanding that is only the beginning. Because once you see it clearly, a deeper question emerges. What happens when a group that fought hard for visibility and recognition finally gets it? What do they do with the tactics they developed to survive?

History has an answer for that. And it isn’t always a comfortable one.

Pulling up the ladder

There is a concept in sociology called “pulling up the ladder”. The concept is associated with economist Ha-Joon Chang, and it describes a pattern that appears consistently across history (in labour movements, civil rights struggles, professional industries, etc.) whenever a group gains access to a resource or position that was previously denied to them. The pattern goes like this: once inside, the group (often unconsciously, rarely maliciously) begins to restrict access for others. The tactics they used to break through become the walls they build around what they’ve won. The ladder they climbed gets pulled up behind them.

It doesn’t happen because people are hypocrites. It happens because of two very human tendencies that emerge almost inevitably after a hard-won breakthrough.

The first is scarcity mindset. When you have fought for access to something limited… recognition, dancing partners, a place on the floor… you develop a deep instinct to protect what you’ve gained. The floor felt scarce when you were invisible. It still feels scarce now that you’re visible. Sharing access feels like losing ground. So you hold what you have, not out of greed, but out of a fear that is completely understandable given everything it took to get there.

The second is the need to prove legitimacy. When a group breaks into a space that wasn’t built for them, they often feel (consciously or not) that their presence needs to be justified. That they need to be better, more dedicated, more serious than the people who were already there. This creates a dynamic where the newly arrived group distances itself from anyone who might undermine that legitimacy. Including people who are now facing the same struggle they just came through. Because association with the still-excluded feels like a step backwards. Like a threat to the recognition they fought so hard to earn.

Together, these two tendencies produce something that looks, from the outside, like indifference to others. But from the inside, it feels like self-preservation.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes

In tango, the pattern is younger and quieter. But it is the same.

Female leaders fought for visibility in a culture that was built around the male leader as the default. They developed tactics to survive in rooms that didn’t see them. They built communities within the community… practicas… workshops… collectives… where their role was recognised, and their skill was taken seriously. That work was necessary. And it changed the culture in ways that are genuinely good for Tango.

But something else is happening at the same time. The same female leaders who know intimately what it feels like to be structurally invisible are now, in some cases, the loudest voices explaining the retreat of male leaders as indifference. The same people who broke down one set of barriers have become, in some communities, resistant to examining what their breakthrough might cost others. Not because they are malicious. Because that is what pulling up the ladder looks like from the inside. It feels like self-preservation. It feels like protecting what was hard won. It feels, in the moment, completely justified.

And the male leader standing at the edge of the floor… uncertain… overlooked… quietly concluding that the effort isn’t worth it, is living through something remarkably similar to what female leaders lived through not so long ago. The struggle has a different shape. The structural causes are different. But the feeling of the floor telling you consistently that your place in it is shrinking… that part is the same.

We have been here before. We just weren’t watching from this angle.

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A choice to be made

There is something almost hopeful in recognising a pattern. Not because recognition fixes anything. But because a pattern you can name is one you can choose not to repeat.

It never happens deliberately. Every group that has pulled up the ladder behind them was doing what groups do when the ground they stand on still feels uncertain beneath their feet. They were protecting what they had won. They were surviving. That is not an excuse. But it is an explanation.

In Tango, the sign is subtle, but it is there. It lives in the narrative that has quietly become the default explanation for what we are observing. The narrative that female leaders are the hard workers and male leaders are the ones who don’t care to improve. That narrative comes from a real place. Female leaders who spent years on the receiving end of poor leading have genuine reasons to carry that frustration. That experience is valid.

But the generalisation of that experience into a community story is where it becomes something else. Something that looks familiar. Not long ago, the story was that women couldn’t lead. That they lacked the spatial awareness, the authority, the instinct for navigation. That story was wrong. It was a preconception built from a structural reality that was then used to justify keeping that reality in place.

The story that male leaders don’t care to improve is doing the same work. It takes a structural observation (men are not improving at the rate the theory predicted) and turns it into a character judgment. And once it becomes a character judgment, the structural conditions that might actually help get left unexamined. Because why build support for people who don’t care?

One preconception replaced by another. The ladder pulled up in a different direction.

The female leaders who fought for visibility in tango did something genuinely difficult and genuinely important. That is not in question. What is in question is what happens next. Whether the recognition they earned becomes a door that stays open… or one that quietly closes behind them.

And for the male leaders who are retreating… the beginners who conclude too early that the effort isn’t worth it… the mid-level dancers who stop pushing… the forty-year-old who walks into a milonga once and doesn’t come back… the question is whether the community that fought so hard to see female leaders will find the same energy to see them.

We know the pattern. We know where it leads. We are early enough in this particular chapter that the ending hasn’t been written yet.

But someone has to decide to write it differently.

Before tonight’s Goodnight Tango… just a small thank-you.
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Tonight’s Goodnight Tango

Tonight’s goodnight tango is La Última Curda. It is not a song about villains. It is a song about confronting painful truths that are easier to avoid than to face. In much the same way, this post is not arguing that female leaders are wrong or that male leaders are right. It is asking whether communities can recognise the patterns they are capable of reproducing, even when those patterns emerge from struggles that were entirely justified.

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