"crabs in a basket"

A friend got me thinking about "crabs in a basket" -- in the context of women and minority business owners and others who seem to be more interested in pulling each other back down into the basket than in supporting each other in our success...

then I read this quote from an essay by Bill Huang about politics in the Phillipines called "Crabs in the Basket" that got me thinking about what we need to do to address the crab problem:

"... If you think about it long and hard, though, it's not really the fault of the crab. Consider that crabs don't pull each other down in open sand or sea. It's the basket that poses the problem."

So, in the case of women and minority owned businesses, if we were free to compete equally across the full breadth of the market place instead of simply in the confines of the basket we are offered (competing against each other for a fraction of the business, for example), there might be more swimming to success and less pulling each other down in the effort to get ahead.

hmmmm ... so who put us in the basket? and, how do we make the basket go away?