Some time in spring of 2026, two women decided to dance a tanda at a notoriously traditional milonga in Buenos Aires. They were then scolded and physically attacked by the milonga’s organiser, equally notorious for his intolerant ways of managing the public by giving out “red” and “yellow” cards and insisting on traditionally gendered roles in his events. Various associations of tango professionals in Argentina and beyond have since condemned his behavior as gender discrimination. For many dancers, this whole incident sounded like an absurd blast from the past, as most of us are now used to roles no longer being strictly gendered. This particular wheel of history is unlikely to be turned around and I’m writing this article, my first since the pandemic (yes!), to tell you why I think that more and more women leading is a very good thing for tango community as a whole.
If you are a social dancer with a few years of experience, and especially if you’ve dabbed into event organising, teaching or running a tango school, you have become, at some point, painfully aware that the economics of our beautiful tango world hinge primarily on the availability and the behaviour of the male leaders. Tango is a men’s world because in most communities, with a few lucky exceptions, there are way more women than men. Therefore for any tango activity to be successful, you need a high enough number of male leaders willing to participate or the whole enterprise crumbles to the ground. This creates a dynamic in which female followers are dependent on male leaders willing to take classes, go out dancing, practice and participate in special events way more than the other way around.
This is a well-observed phenomenon, especially in large cities like Paris, where I live. Having too many female followers for each male leader makes followers work hard on their skills, looks and overall attractiveness. All the while reducing the stakes for the male leaders to get the dancers they want, making them less eager to compete with each other and to improve their skills. If a lof of female followers are willing to dance with you in a milonga because they don’t want to spend hours sitting and waiting, as a leader the temptation is strong to see it as your own merit.
When there are too few men and too many women, with followers getting better due to cut throat competition and leaders not improving because of the lack thereof, we can observe the ripple effect of that imbalance on literally every domain of tango. Local milongas are faced with way more followers not dancing, getting frustrated and quitting. The available male leaders, despite the obvious privileges, feel more pressure to dance with followers they wouldn’t necessarily choose. Local teachers struggle to fill up their classes because male leaders quit learning after barely one-two years of tango, once they have gained access to followers they like. Not enough male leaders in classes means many followers are not able to study or practice. There are less people taking classes, less people practicing and improving and the community level of skill as a whole stagnates, making every local event a bit of a “same old, same old”.
Some frustrated followers leave tango altogether or quit improving as well, because what’s the point. Others become aggressive in going after the available leaders, taking the “cut throat competition” to another level. Yet others are pulled into a toxic spiral of trying to outperform all other women when it comes to skill, age and beauty. Male leaders motivated and talented enough to become good dancers are cherished as the few “stars” of the community that all the followers want to dance with. This creates a power imbalance and a celebrity aura that not many male egos can resist abusing. These men then get away with questionable behaviour, protected by their status of a “good dancer” or a “brilliant professional”.
The same dynamics are present in special events. In a situation of severe gender imbalance festival organisers struggle to fill up the workshops, so they will often choose to invite the same teaching couples that are the stars of the moment, in hopes that their fame attracts male students. However, celebrity couples are expensive, so it becomes even more crucial to get enough male leaders to fill up the workshops by pairing them with a large population of eager and desperate female followers. In many events, the organisers put the pressure of balancing the genders on the female followers, by requiring them to register in couple with a man (and not “a leader”). Single followers find themselves, again and again, at the tail end of a long waiting list. Some events try to balance the genders themselves, creating another interesting phenomenon: male leaders that are chased by the organisers to fill up the quota with a significant discount or even for free. These men no longer register or pay for the event as early as everyone else, while the waiting list of solo followers keeps growing, and then swoop in like a knight in shining armor to save some lucky damsel in distress.
Gender imbalance in favour of men creates a lot of frustration, self-doubt, self-loathing and self-abandonment in women who are trapped in that dynamic. I want to stress that the imbalance itself is not the fault of the male leaders (after all, they are the ones who already dance). The problem is how the imbalance affects the social capital and the social rewards of everyone involved. We would probably observe similar phenomena were the gender balance reversed. I’ve talked to women who could no longer stand having to wait for an available leader in a row of other women, all of them well-dressed, most of them quite or even exceptionally skilled, all of them passionately in love with tango. It’s worse when you are an older woman. I remember a social media post by a female teacher from Paris, expressing her sadness at how little male leaders were interested in taking classes as opposed to women who kept improving their dance, and the astonishing amount of vitriol in the comments on that post, mostly from men.
In the professional field, gender imbalance takes a severe invisible toll on female dancers. While a good male dancer is a star, even with few credentials and a subpar level of dancing, an excellent professional follower is just business as usual and a dime a dozen. Many local female teachers run schools, events and workshops, doing all the tedious work of keeping a community together, for an invited male teacher (often from Argentina) to come in, do his thing, get paid and disappear to another gig where another women is doing everything, yet is forever considered his “assistant”. As an artist in a collaboration with a partner, women know that in case of the couple breaking up the man will have a multitude of excellent followers to choose from, whereas a female professional follower will most likely struggle to find a new partner at her level. It is more frequent that after a breakup the male star of the duo continues his brilliant career uninterrupted, sometimes with a much younger and less experienced follower, while the female star’s career stagnates or she has to start from scratch. Sometimes, the more experienced you are as a professional follower, the less male professionals will want to collaborate with you because you’ve been through a lot and you know how shit’s done and you are less willing to self-abandon to his perceived superiority.
Women in professional couples often take upon themselves most of the repetitive, boring but necessary labour that goes into maintaining a collaboration and an artistic “product”, labour that goes unnoticed and unrewarded. How many teaching couples have you met in which the man does most of the talking in his own language and the woman translates what he says to a foreign language so that the students can understand? Having to translate means you have way less time to actually say something yourself. It also means you are in service of your partner instead of being an equal. How many teaching couples have you seen in which it’s the woman who handles all the correspondence and the student attendance and the communication and the payments and the planning, while the man only comes in to shine and to entertain as a teacher? Add to this that it is quite easy for a solo male dancer to work as a traveling teacher and artist, while it is sometimes impossible for a female professional.
To all my sisters in trade, teachers, performers and organisers, I want to say: I see you. I know your pain. I’ve been there.
“Oh no, not another feminist bashing on men,” you might be thinking. So what about the men?
Dancing as a male leader in a strongly imbalanced community obviously comes with many privileges. However, as in every power imbalance, there are hidden costs for those on top of the hierarchy. The first obvious one is that when you are no longer interested in developing your tango skills, you are missing out on your own potential. Of course, improving your dance is not an imperative. You can enjoy it without striving for self-improvement. But developing your skills is actually a big part of the fun and the beauty of the whole endeavour and you willingly give up on that just because there is little to no competition?
Another insidious consequence of the imbalance is that, as a male leader, you will dance with followers you like but who only dance with you because it’s either you or not dancing at all. They won’t tell you that. They’ll be friendly. They’ll make sure you don’t notice. If you are ok with half-hearted consent, then it’s fine. But wouldn’t you prefer your dance partner to really desire this tanda with you? And lastly, as I mentioned, there is a constant pressure on the available male leaders, especially the skilled ones, to dance with as many followers as they can. This often takes away the option of choosing only the ones you want and being picky makes you feel like a arrogant snob. And you get dirty looks if you dare to follow or lead another man. Yet, we all know that learning to follow makes every leader better at leading. Also, what if you actually really like following as a man? God forbid!
And so in many communities, especially in Europe, in the first two decades of this century tango was this beautiful thing that also made so many of us struggle, especially women. And then the pandemic hit.
During covid lockdowns, a few things happened. While there was no more tango, many people turned to online classes, often solo, women and men alike. Sometimes it was simply a desperate attempt to hold on to the life line of tango while the world was in full shutdown. For some people it was the first time they took a technique class. Many people realised that improving their skills was actually incredibly fun and rewarding. Once milongas were possible again, these online students came back to tango with a renewed thirst for improvement. But what was truly momentous was the way women started practicing with other women, for the lack of male partners, and therefore learning how to lead: a skill they had long wanted to try but the tough competition to be a desirable follower had taken up all their time and effort.
Here in Paris, while the inside milongas were still prohibited, people went to dance in open air events during summer months and I was amazed to see how many women were dancing and practicing with each other. I was also one of them. The shift felt significant. The moment I could reopen my classes in person, I started giving “leading for women” workshops and to this day, these workshops are a stable success. I know a few other female professionals in different parts of the world who felt that shift too and started offering leading for women classes. In Paris, we now have a collective, Las Malevas, of four female teachers (me included) that offers weekly leading for women classes. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like women weren’t leading in milongas or taking classes as a leader before. Plenty of them did. Events celebrating women and all-female practicas existed in some places already before the pandemic. But in many communities it’s after the pandemic that those numbers exploded.
Another thing that happened was what I would call “a leap in awareness”. When tango was forcibly taken away from us, temporarily, many dancers, and especially women, reflected on and talked to each other about what they loved and hated about tango. And many of them started rejecting the idea of having to look for a male partner in order to be allowed to participate in a marathon or a festival. If an event did not allow for women leaders, double role dancers or solo female followers, they didn’t want it. They were done with that whole “get yourself a man first before you can enjoy tango” thing. Instead, they sought out other women to partner with.
The shift had a quick and visible impact on tango economy. Teachers started selling more classes. Local schools became more inclined to teach everyone both roles from the start, which made the gender imbalance less of an issue, including in classes with too many male students. Now that it’s normal to switch roles, men learn and practice with each other without a second thought. And although this might have been the case in many schools before the pandemic, nowadays it is becoming a mainstream practice.
All the big tango shoe brands started expeditiously designing and selling the so-called “practice shoes” for women, cute leather boots with a low heel that you can now get in all possible colours and materials. Note how they are still called “practice shoes” although a lot of women wear them in milongas, both for leading and following, sometimes forsaking the high heels altogether. Yet somehow leading for women is still “practice”, not a real thing, right? Oh the sweetly rotten scent of inconspicuous misogyny still lingering here and there. Practically every woman I know now owns a pair of cute little boots. They are great for leading but also for following because, unlike the bulky dance sneakers, they look elegant with skirts and dresses. And did you notice that women dancing in pants is trending again?
When followers start to lead, they have two things already going for them. One, they are used to working hard and to improving their skills, and they know that there’s a payoff. They are inclined to work hard in classes and to dedicate time to practicing and dancing as a leader in a milonga. Second, they all have had the experience of a bad tanda with a leader with poor skills, they have been on the receiving end of it many times. It makes them hellbent on being a considered and comfortable leader. They also have to combat quite a few stereotypes, such as “women are terrible at navigation” or “it’s never as good as dancing with a man”. The better leaders women become, the more other women want to dance with them, which means that some followers no longer have to rely on those “half hearted consent” tandas with male leaders they are not too enthusiastic about. A lot of followers tell me that they’d much rather dance with a less experienced but careful and dedicated woman leader than with some male leaders they used to dance with before.
The only group less thrilled with this whole development are of course the male leaders who are now facing competition they didn’t see coming.
With baby leaders eager to learn, the event organisers are able to fill up more workshops during festivals. Social dancing events are now slowly opening up to possibilities of disconnecting gender from the roles, although it remains tricky, as marathons still seek gender balance for a good reason. You can specify not only your gender but whether you dance “mostly as a follower” or “mostly as a leader” or “both equally” when registering for most marathons now. And although queer tango festivals and double-role events have existed in the world for over two decades, these events are also getting an influx of fresh dancers, women (and some men) who like to dance both roles but do not necessarily identify as queer. And this is how women liberating themselves from the crushing pressure of unfair competition liberates everyone. Men are now able to dance and practice with each other if they so wish, and it clearly changes their tango experience for the better.
Lastly, all-female professional couples are getting more recognition. I know all about it because I am part of one, I work with an amazing female leader Asya Moiseeva. You can probably name one or two female leaders or duos, although globally there are still more all-male tango couples and they tend to be more famous. Despite the newly found equilibrium, tango is still very much centered on the male presence, the male skill, the male virtuosity. Although organisers are now more willing to invite all-female couples, it is often still difficult to attract male leaders to a workshop given by a female leader. On the other hand, when organisers add a female couple to their lineup, they can be sure to attract double-role dancers who will want to learn from them. This makes me hopeful for the future of all-female collaborations and for female artists to be taken more seriously. To the organisers I would like to say, no matter how much you admire your favorite male artists, you can be sure that their female partners and female professionals in general very likely had to work way harder and face more obstacles to get where they are.
A less expected outcome of women turning to leadership is that a lot of them, and especially more mature women, are discovering that they are naturally born leaders. They actually like leading way more than following. This means that many older women suddenly find an authentic voice and a place in tango where they are sought after for their skill by other women, while being overlooked by male leaders. Leading gives them a kind of a “second life” as a woman in tango. And discovering how leading naturally aligns with their personality is magical in itself. We traditionally see leading as a “masculine” role but the qualities of a good leader (being able to listen, to guide, to entertain, to engage, to protect, to take responsibility, to communicate, to connect) are actually also those of a good parent. A good mother. A lot of women are natural leaders simply because they are women. Who knew!
Does this mean that as a female follower you now absolutely have to learn how to lead? Not if you don’t feel like it. You are totally free to stick to following. The good thing about leading, it doesn’t really matter when you start, as long as you enjoy it. Your following skills will be of great help and will speed up the learning process significantly when you choose to start leading. The good news is also that as a follower, you will now see more and more good female leaders in milongas who might want to cabeceo you. Watch out for unexpected miradas. You will often not know that a woman is also an excellent leader if she dances both roles, there are not that many ways to signal to other women “I also lead”, even if you wear pants and “practice” boots. If as a woman you already lead, don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t even have to be that good for you to get lots of cabeceo attempts from some of the best followers in town!
To all the people who, like the organiser of the infamous milonga in Buenos Aires, think that true tango is something that can only happen between a (heterosexual) man and a (heterosexual) woman, I feel like saying that you are allowed to feel this way about it, as long as you don’t use violence on people who have a different opinion. The beauty of tango is that it pushes you to find your own “true tango”, one that works for you, on the condition that nobody else is harmed in the process. This dance has long been defined by male bodies dancing with female bodies and we are used to it feeling this way, so two female or two male bodies dancing together are bound to feel and look different. But is different less true? Maybe for you it is. It is not for me, not with my experience. I believe that it is not our gender or sexual orientation or age or body type that make us a tango dancer, it is how we connect to our body, to the music, to the floor, to the other person. It is our ability to abandon ourselves to this dance and to make someone blissfully happy to be in our arms for just a few odd songs. That quiet, deep, transformative magic of a really good tanda. You know? I’m sure you do.
May 12, 2026
Veronica Toumanova 