Paid parental leave backflip affects all us nasty women

There have been a few things this past week that have made me angry. Maybe I'm just a nasty woman. One of those intelligent, outspoken pants wearing types that Donald Trump so despises. Or perhaps even one of those yoga pant wearing women that Alan Sorrentino, of Rhode Island, despises. I have been known, it has to be said, to head out in my activewear, sometimes even in my activewear and slippers. And I really don't care who despises me. Because I'm angry.

I don't think I'm quite over the wine-spilling incident from last week, where in all my clumsiness I knocked a glass of wine over the shoes of the fellow sitting next to me. I apologised profusely and when my friend got me a top up this man turned to me and made it very clear that he would not be happy if I spilt that glass over his $200 shoes.

My anger now has nothing to do with the fact that we were watching a film, , about the poorest of people. I wrote about that last week.

My anger now is about how I felt threatened by the behaviour of the man next to me. I have wondered, many times this week in fact, if he would have said anything if I was a man and I had spilt my beer over him. Or would it just have been a sorry mate, no worries, and nothing else would have been said. Or if I had have been there with another man, rather than a girlfriend (one who, mind you, makes me feel very safe and happy whenever I am with her). Would he have said anything?

I'm not usually one to let stuff like this bother me. I can take it. I've been in situations before where, because I am a woman, people have responded differently to me. You can't get through a few years of sports journalism without some tosser thinking you know less than him about rugby or cricket just because you don't have balls. So to speak.

But shoeless Joe has got to me. He treated me that way because I am a woman.

Which, in a roundabout way, is why I'm angry about the federal government's backflip on government-funded parental leave. As chair of the Social Policy Committee of the National Foundation For Australian Women, Marie Coleman puts it: "If you did this with changes to superannuation or negative gearing, every conservative in the country would be foaming at the mouth by breakfast time tomorrow, but maybe the government thinks: 'These are only pregnant women who've got a mortgage.' They don't care."

We do bloody care. More than you bloody know. Which is why we're so bloody angry about the whole thing.

It's not about getting women back into the workforce, it's not about access to childcare even. Why shouldn't we be doing everything we possibly can as a nation to give women as much time as we can to spend with their babies?