Another year, another March 8 and another International Women’s Day! Your Twitter feed, and all other social networking platforms, will again be flooded with messages on women empowerment. Debates on ‘how men need to behave with women so that the ‘second’ gender is no more suppressed’ will once again take the centre stage.

It may be difficult for many people (living in denial) to digest, but there is an inherent truth which we all need to boldly face today. The talks about ‘finding equality for women’ will never cease till the day women themselves stop to pull each other down to dust.

When Hollywood actor Emma Watson decided to go topless for a photo-shoot, other women must have celebrated her choice. Instead, she was ‘beaten’ down with a stick called ‘feminism’. Isn’t feminism all about respecting women’s choice? But, at the end, it is human tendency to always miss out the important point and grab every possibility of defaming a woman. It is worse when even women fail in getting the feminism on point.

“It just always reveals to me how many misconceptions and what a misunderstanding there is about what feminism is. Feminism is about giving women choice. Feminism is not a stick with which to beat other women with. It’s about freedom, it’s about liberation, it’s about equality. I really don’t know what my tits have to do with it. It’s very confusing,” this is what the Harry Potter actor had to say when she was cornered by the so-called ‘feminists’.

She did what she did by her choice – that’s the beauty of it (feminism). She was not forced to go topless by other people; therefore it was pointless to pull the chords of feminism on her.

Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar’s film ‘Toilet- Ek prem Katha’, which talked about a bold subject of open defecation, had several sections where it was highlighted how women don’t tender support to each other whenever required. The movie had a dialogue – ‘aurtein hee aurton ki sabse badi dishman hain (women are women’s greatest enemy)’. I wish, I could say that the actor was wrong. I wish, I could say that women stand with each other no matter what. But, history speaks otherwise.

PepsiCo Chairwoman and Chief Executive Officer, Indra Nooyi once lifted the curtains off the brutal truth while talking at the Women in the World conference in the year 2016.

“I don’t believe women help women enough in the workplace,” said Nooyi adding that “Why do women compete with other women too much in the workplace? … What’s wrong with us women? We ought to be helping each other out. The sisterhood has to become way stronger than it is today.”

At the end, it won’t matter how hard we fight against the gender inequality, until and unless, we (women) give due respect and lend support to other women. This has to be sorted at women’s end first, so that the next time when a woman is trying to break a shackle of stereotype or gender inequality or all the other social evils, she doesn’t have to do it alone.