It’s been nearly a month since the 2016 election finally came to a close, and many are still grappling with the fact that Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States. Madonna, in particular, has had a difficult time accepting the news. In an interview with Billboard published on Monday, she said the announcement was so rattling that, “It felt like someone had died,” and that she was especially baffled by the high percentage of women that supported him. But, whether you agree with her or not, why Madonna thinks so many women voted for Trump highlights an important underlying issue we need to overcome to move forward.

How many women — particularly white women — voted for The Donald was one of the more surprising stats to come out of this year’s election. Not because all women should vote for a candidate simply because she’s female, but because Trump made multiple controversial comments toward women throughout his campaign. By the time Nov. 8 rolled around, several women had come forward with sexual assault claims against him, all of which the president-elect has thoroughly denied in multiple statements. There have been many a think piece as to why so many women chose to overlook those factors, but Madonna tied it to a broader problem.

As she told Billboard,

Women hate women. That’s what I think it is. Women’s nature is not to support other women. It’s really sad. Men protect each other, and women protect their men and children. Women turn inward and men are more external. A lot of it has do with jealousy and some sort of tribal inability to accept that one of their kind could lead a nation. Other people just didn’t bother to vote because they didn’t like either candidate, or they didn’t think Trump had a chance in the world. They took their hands off the wheel and then the car crashed.

That may be a leap of a connection, but the numbers signal something worth discussing. According to CBS News’ exit poll, 42 percent of all women and 53 percent of white women voted for Trump. When you consider white Protestant women, that figure jumps to 64 percent for Trump and just 32 percent for Clinton — by and large the majority. Still, there are a host of reasons why women may have voted for Trump: maybe they wanted a Republican back in office after an eight-year Democratic reign, or perhaps they thought this was their only, if painful, chance to disband the big money that's long ruled politics. Regardless of the rationale that can't be generalized, the fact is that it happened, and we have to press forward. It's a hard pill to swallow, but criticizing our female peers is sort of the antithesis to Madonna’s point.

What we can do instead is try harder to understand each other, and to come together around the issues that demand a woman’s voice. If we take anything away from this election, it should be that there are bridges to be built, and pitting ourselves against one another will only widen those gaps. Whether or not Madonna's correlation is fair, we know one thing to be true: we're stronger together, and no man is going to shake that.