The budget is bad for the working class and good for the rich. And women are mostly workers, not bosses. We get the double burden of being exploited at work alongside our brothers as well as oppressed everywhere because we’re women.

The budget has helped Angela Priestley, who runs the generally pro-business Women’s Agenda website, to recognise this class divide even if she can’t name it in those terms. “As 51 percent of the population, the circumstances of individual women vary dramatically. So, even viewing the budget through a specific gender lens — as a number of interest groups did during the industry lock-up yesterday — offers a mixed view of just how much it will hurt ‘women’ as a whole.”

Looking at the effect of the budget on working class women highlights its magnitude as an attack on workers. Women working in the public service face the very real threat of losing their jobs, with 16,500 Commonwealth public servants to be sacked.  Childcare workers, overwhelmingly women, are some of the lowest paid workers in the country. The $200 million cut from childcare programs will come at the expense of their jobs, wages and training.

It’s precisely because women’s wages are often so much lower than men’s that most female/male couples have no choice about which of them takes time off work if they have children. This doesn’t just affect the overall living standards of working class families, or the ability of women to accumulate superannuation (women on average retire with one third of the superannuation of men), it also means that increases to university fees will affect women disproportionately.

Estimates suggest that women who take time off work to have a baby will pay 30 percent more interest on student loans than their male counterparts. For example, a male nurse would take 33 years to pay off the average student debt, with an interest bill of $38,400. By comparison a female nurse who took time out of work to look after a child would take 39 years to pay off the debt. She would have an interest bill of $50,300.

Family Tax Benefit B was worth around $3000 a year. Now, when your youngest child turns six, you’ll lose it. This, they say, is intended to “encourage” women to get a job. It’ll just make them poorer. Other factors like the end of the schoolkids bonus and increased costs of healthcare and fuel will all have the greatest effect on those with the least money.

An unemployed single mother with one eight year old child (who is therefore on Newstart and not the higher parenting payment) will lose at least $54 per week (12.2 percent of her income). At the other end of the scale, an individual on three times the average wage will only pay an extra $24 a week (1 percent) and high income couples could bring in as much as $360,000 a year and not contribute anything extra.

Cancelling the Low Income Super Contribution – an additional $500 for workers earning less than $37,000 a year – also stings women, who make up 2.1 million of the 3 million workers on such incomes. Gina Rinehart has no such worries about how she’ll fund her old age. The important comparison between budget winners and losers is not between women and men, but between classes.