If there is one fact more shocking than Hillary Clinton’s loss to a self-proclaimed sexual predator, it is the contribution of women’s votes in her debacle. Polls conducted on demographics (including factors like race, age and education) figure that between 53 and 66 percent of white women voted for Trump – a man who denigrated them – to defeat a woman whose campaign explicitly gave priority to women and families.

This result that has caught liberals unawares and has perhaps a similar learning for feminists. Perhaps it was too early for the Clinton campaign to count on the support of the sisterhood. The ‘Lean In’ movement, espousing women to support each other as they rise, was seen as a mainstream movement among feminists, but now appears to exist in lonely bubbles in big cities (similar to liberalism).

It is in the nature of bubbles to be extremely vulnerable. What lies outside this enclosed circle of feminism is probably closer to the thought that feminists have spent years in rejecting – the stereotype that women are each other’s worst enemies.

The assumption was that the ‘mean girls’ had grown up once they were out of high school, entered the brave, newly-liberated world of women, and no longer connived or competed. That the saas bahus so vicious on screen were figments of our imagination, and had few real-life equivalents.  That catfights were mere male fantasies.

Recent Twitter battles between celebrities like Niki Minaj and Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Rihanna, and so on show that incidents of backstabbing and gossiping between high profile women are common. The gutter sniping on shows like Bigg Boss and other reality television shows where women compete for the attention of men shows a reality far removed from the feminist ideal. These are the women we see and are shown, and they are what inform the popular construct of femininity and feminine power.

Even a cursory look around shows the lack of women in positions of authority, a shortage of women leaders, and most of all, very few women secure enough to mentor other women. Forget the post-feminism era many considered was dawning, it seems the fight for women’s liberation – from both patriarchal attitudes, and from themselves – is just beginning.

Women, with alarming regularity, take pride in saying they are “one of the boys”, in one stroke erasing their own femininity and ignoring the struggling women around them. Often, her reason is the inability to bond with those who are conversant only with ‘womanly’ subjects – makeup, clothes, one’s physical appearance. In a bid to be taken more seriously in a man’s world, she labels as inferior a woman’s very valid concern about her looks and the self-esteem that often depends upon it.

In women chanting “Lock her up” and calling Clinton a “nasty” woman in imitation of the man whose every flaw they have forgiven, we see the secret social battles waged, in many cases by those espousing girl power. So many female friendships are those that are endured rife with carefully-concealed negativity and jealousy threatening to bubble to the surface, in a way the very real rivalry of men is not.

There are many reasons for the paucity of women leaders, many of them to do with patriarchy; but this habit of women shutting each other out is probably the saddest.

Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and the author of Lean In said if you support other women, people around you may notice you are a woman. This may seem to be ridiculous on the surface, but in a workplace where opportunities for women are already limited, seeming unfeminine is an advantage. In this environment to go out of the way to mentor or help other women only draws attention to one’s gender. It may also be seen as threatening – to help other women is to increase your own competition further up the totem pole, where the space for women is already limited.

This idea that there is either no or limited space for women at the top is why many women feel other women’s accomplishments are a direct threat to their own. It’s why women bosses balance their prospects by paying more attention to their male protégés. Think about this: could Hillary Clinton have had a woman as her vice presidential running mate? And yet, there have been 240 years of two men holding the coveted top two slots with not a murmur of protest.

In spite of the real competitiveness between men, we as a society accept that they can make connections, particularly in the professional world, faster and longer-lasting than women. They have their cigar clubs and locker rooms, and as reprehensible as the talk in there seems to be (as revealed by the Trump tapes), these are secure places that men use to bond between one another; even if it is at the expense of women on occasion. The equivalent of this is perhaps the ladies room, where women could bond but stereotypically end up assessing one other.

Many women openly say they would prefer working for a male boss, thus denigrating the idea of working under a female without ever having experienced it. These are women conditioned to accept the patriarchal view of things – that women should be put down, bullied, discriminated against, as they perhaps once were. They allow men their follies and defects, all the while following a different set of standards to judge women professionals. This is the reflection of the behaviour of the large constituency of white women voters to Clinton and Trump.

That Trump’s crass comments and the countless allegations against him did not turn off these women is internalised misogyny. Many claimed they did not want to “vote with their vaginas”, a phrase so steeped in sexism. When men vote for other men, they almost always are seen as thinking voters, rather than slaves to any anatomical part. It is these women’s inner insecurities and internalised gender prejudice that they failed to see the ramifications of their vote. Already privileged, these women failed not just Clinton, but other women as well – women of colour and younger women who voted overwhelmingly for her, and who give hope that in another generation, feminism will thrive, and not just in the bubble.

Almost all social systems discriminate against women. Many have the excuse of centuries of tradition, of entrenched male privilege now gearing up for a fight against a new enemy: the liberated woman. But what is the excuse of women discriminating against each other? If 100 years ago they could be allies in the suffragette movement, winning the right to vote, how did the sisterhood turn out to be so hollow? Along with liberals, feminists too are wringing their hands wondering what went wrong. The only conclusion is that we are very far from the liberal, post-feminist time in which we thought we lived.