Through the swarm of images that showed up on Pinterest as I was rummaging for a compelling visual to illustrate a column I was writing on the wage gap in the art world, one pin popped out at me. "Empowered women empower other women," it read. Such a deceptively simple message, delivered in just five words, and yet how it resonates! Women's empowerment is a term that's bandied about a lot, usually forming the title of ministries or the taglines of women's-centric NGOs, but we rarely isolate it to look at what it implies. There's an implicit power dynamic coded into it: Who is empowering whom and how? Who deems the empowering agent fit to empower an other person? I thought about this when I hobbled to board my flight back to Delhi after a month's sojourn in Mumbai, including a fortnight of convalescence. I was walking like a pregnant woman, except I was nursing the hollow that had been left by a lasered-out fibroid. My hands would instantly form a shield around my nothingness whenever it seemed like someone might whack their bag onto my stitches or elbow into my sore skin.