I have never been particularly fond of symbolic days and I often find them to be token gestures. International Women’s Day, however, is something I look at through a slightly different lens because it did not begin as a celebration. It began as dissent.

In the early twentieth century, women workers marched in the streets demanding better wages, safer working conditions, and the right to vote. Activists like Clara Zetkin proposed the idea of an international day so women across countries could organize, mobilize, and raise their voices together. The earliest gatherings were not greeting exchanges or celebratory panels, and they were not protests against men. They were protests, rallies, and political demands for equal rights.

Every year when Women’s Day arrives, I see what brands and people do around it. Working in the marketing space makes this even harder to ignore because the day turns into a fascinating case study of how narratives evolve. There are messages, flowers, campaigns, panels, cheerful reminders that women are strong and inspiring, and a familiar narrative that men need to do better.

That is not untrue. Men absolutely do need to do better.

But this year I want to ask a different question.

What can women do?

Sisterhood is often spoken about as if it is automatic, as if women naturally stand by each other simply because we share the same gender, but my experience has rarely felt that simple or that linear. Solidarity among women, at least in the spaces I have lived and worked in, is uneven, complicated, selective at times, and occasionally missing entirely.

Some of my earliest memories of this come from family gatherings where older women would sit together and casually discuss the bodies of younger girls in the room. The tone was always framed as concern. Someone had gained weight. Someone needed to take better care of herself. Someone’s clothes were becoming a little too fitted. None of these conversations were really about health or well-being. They were just about how a girl should appear in the world and how early she must begin adjusting herself to meet those expectations.

It struck me even then that the lessons about shrinking ourselves were often delivered by other women.

The same pattern appears in everyday moments that seem small but carry the weight of an entire system behind them. A woman quietly telling another woman that her saree pallu should be adjusted because a male relative is uncomfortable. The message travels through a woman’s voice, but the discomfort belongs to a man who apparently cannot simply look away.

I often find myself wondering why the burden of managing male discomfort always lands on women, and why women so frequently become the ones responsible for enforcing those expectations.

Over time I began noticing another pattern that felt even more complicated. In public spaces, especially among younger generations, the language of empowerment has become very fluent. Women speak confidently about independence, agency, and equality. Workplaces celebrate women’s leadership. Social media is filled with conversations about empowerment and solidarity.

But, but many of those conversations don't happen inside our homes.

I remember a moment during a family discussion about politics when someone in the room dismissed a woman politician not because of her policies or her work but because she drinks alcohol. I remember feeling genuinely puzzled by the argument and responding that I drink too, even though I hardly drink. I said it simply to make a point about the absurdity of judging a woman’s competence through her personal choices.

The response was a dismissive gesture across my face, the kind that signals a conversation should end immediately, as if I had just been cancelled from the discussion. Everyone else in the room, including the men who would otherwise call themselves feminist allies, remained silent. People who otherwise speak about equality and empowerment chose not to say a word.

The person who speaks up in such moments inevitably becomes the one who made the fun family gathering uncomfortable.

In many ways I have fought far harder battles with men in workplaces than I ever have inside homes. Those battles honestly felt easier. There were disagreements, arguments, moments when I had to push back against ideas that were dismissive or unfair. But strangely, I rarely felt completely alone in those spaces. There were colleagues who spoke up, allies who supported, and sometimes even men who were willing to question themselves and the systems they were part of.

The battle at home felt lonelier than any of that, because when the people you expect to stand beside you quietly step back, the argument you thought belonged to everyone suddenly becomes yours alone. For a long time I interpreted that silence as indifference. Over time I began to see it differently.

Many women are not consciously choosing to uphold patriarchy. Many are carrying it the way it was handed to them. They were raised in systems that taught them that harmony in the household was more important than questioning authority, that being a good daughter or a good wife required quiet endurance rather than open disagreement. These expectations become habits. They travel across generations, often without anyone stopping to examine them.

When younger women remain silent in family spaces, I see the weight of those expectations still sitting on their shoulders. Patriarchy does not survive only because men enforce it. It also survives because women were taught to carry parts of it forward.

Some women might even argue that remaining silent is a choice. That choosing not to challenge elders or disrupt family harmony is simply their way of navigating complicated family relationships. I understand it and yet a part of me continues to question it.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder how much of that choice is truly ours. When a system has shaped expectations for centuries, when girls grow up being taught what a good daughter or a good wife should be, it becomes difficult to separate personal choice from inherited conditioning. Sometimes we believe we are choosing silence freely, when in reality we are simply repeating patterns that were handed down to us long before we had the language to question them.

Silence in those moments may feel like a personal decision, but it is often deeply shaped by the systems we grew up within.

And silence is rarely neutral. Not taking a stand often becomes a stand in itself, because it allows certain ideas to remain unquestioned and certain systems to continue exactly as they are.

I do not write this with anger toward those women. I know that all of us are learning our way through these systems in different ways. The battles we choose, the moments we speak, and the moments we remain silent are shaped by the environments we grow up in.

This is also where the idea of solidarity becomes more complicated. Supporting women cannot only mean supporting women who look like us, live like us, or behave in ways that society approves of. Real solidarity is much messier than that.

It asks harder questions. Do we stand by women from marginalized communities whose struggles are different from our own? Do we question social rules that restrict other women even when those rules benefit us? Do we care about the invisible labour that sustains households and societies? Do we think about the environmental conditions that shape women’s lives?

Solidarity is easy when the struggles look like ours. It becomes meaningful when they do not.

Intersectionality may sound like an academic word, but in reality it simply means recognizing that women’s lives are shaped by many overlapping forces and that gender is only one of them.

Take something as simple as water. In many parts of the world women and girls are the ones responsible for collecting it. Climate change and water scarcity increase that burden. Environmental degradation pushes vulnerable communities further into poverty, and women often carry the heaviest consequences of those shifts.

Yet we rarely connect these realities to conversations about women’s empowerment.

We celebrate women while ignoring the systems that quietly make women’s lives harder.

Which brings me back to the question that I started with.

Women’s Day can be meaningful. It can remind us of how far we have come and of the struggles that made those changes possible. But if the conversation stops at asking what men must change, then it remains incomplete.

Perhaps the more uncomfortable question is this.

What are women willing to confront within our own circles?

Solidarity among women is not a slogan or a greeting exchanged once a year. It shows up in everyday moments, in the small decisions about whether to question something unfair or quietly allow it to pass, and sometimes in the willingness to question other women as well.

I wish I could answer this simple question with some sense of a timeline.

When do women begin to unlearn this burden?