4 Marilyn Waring

Marilyn Waring raised the alarm that women's unpaid labour is invisible in GDP.

She pointed a challenge directly to the UN, and every bureaucracy around the world that used their system.

And her book, Counting for Nothing, inspired a new generation to add a potent dose of unadulterated feminism to economics.

Photo: Tara Hunt 

Marilyn Waring didn’t expect we’d still be talking about her book 30 years on. In 1988 bookstores around the world were stocking a 280-page essay on how women’s unpaid contributions are excluded from GDP. Counting For Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth was the title. This book remains one of the most incisive critiques of how the economy is measured.

Counting for Nothing draws from a decade of political battles, and weeks spent alone in a forgotten library at the United Nations in New York. Marilyn Waring, a former politician from New Zealand, makes the case that women are systematically excluded from measurements of value. Her arguments are backed up by extensive research but can also be understood by a broad audience. The book is angry. It’s also humourous.

The famous feminist Gloria Steinem added the preface, writing that the book was like finally seeing the world with both eyes. Economist John Kenneth Gailbraith called it “splendid work.” Counting for Nothing is now cited throughout the world as countries change how they calculate Gross Domestic Product.

Gross Domestic Product, GDP, is the best-known way to gauge the size of the economy. It’s the value of everything produced each year. It’s how rich a country is. And richer countries tend to be, on average, happier, safer and healthier.

Gross Domestic Product, as we know it, traces back to work on national production by Cambridge economist, Colin Clark, in 1932. This was adapted to the American economy by Simon Kuznets in 1934. But even Kuznets warned that GDP was narrowly defined.

And many others have pointed out that that this way of counting up the value of everything bought in the supermarket, every couch and chair ordered from a furniture shop, every bottle of milk drunk, anything that can be paid for with dollars doesn’t measure many things that we value but are done for free. Take, caring. Looking after Grandma at home does not add to GDP; send her to a rest home, and GDP rises. GDP doesn’t measure the value of clean air. And it counts some things most of us would consider to be bad. An earthquake can raise GDP because the clean-up costs are added.

These arguments have all been made many times before. And so have the arguments that housework is undervalued.

The same year that Simon Kuznets put together American national accounts, in 1934, a pioneering economist called Margaret Reid published a book called The Economics of Household Production.

But it was Marilyn’s work that pointed a challenge directly to the UN, and every bureaucracy around the world that used their system. And her book inspired a new generation to add a potent dose of unadulterated feminism to economics.

***

The American Economic Association holds its 1990 conference in Washington D.C. It’s the biggest event of the year.

Inside from the cold December day, there are over 100 people, filling the room. People listen from the halls. A panel of women economists talk. The discussion is titled, “Can feminism find a home in economics?”

Why now? It’s way past the feminist protests in the 1970s. 15 years after International Women’s Year in 1975. Why are the economists just now talking about feminism?

One tributary to this overflowing meeting was a powerful book published two years earlier, in 1988, Counting for Nothing, which points out, with spirited humour, that economics is fundamentally biased against valuing the contributions of women.

 Writing Counting for Nothing, the founding text for feminist economics, is just one achievement of Marilyn Waring. It’s one of her many big moves. Marilyn is the youngest person to ever be elected to New Zealand’s Parliament. In 1984, she takes a stand against nuclear-powered American ships, which is the straw that topples the New Zealand Government. This is her story.

***

Marilyn grows up in a small town called Taupiri. She told magazine The Monthly that the town “survived on voluntary work. If you had to paint lines on the tennis court or on the athletic track, nobody was being paid for it … people volunteered.”

After completing her studies in political science and international politics, she thinks about putting feminist theory into practice. It’s 1975—international women’s year.

She wants to be a candidate for the conservative National Party. That’s an unusual choice for a young, gay feminist. She later told Radio New Zealand that this was because of the Labour Party leader Norman Kirk’s homophobia.

“Norman Kirk stood up and said it was evil and unnatural and he’d have nothing to do with it. And so I got up from the library, reading that in the paper, and walked down to Lambton Quay and joined the National Party.”

She signs up for the Raglan electorate, which is a mostly rural district.

It really is quite an odd fit. But the National Party has one key advantage for Marilyn: she would be free to “cross the floor.” Crossing the floor means voting on a topic against your party. The ability to vote as she wants means a lot to Marilyn. In fact, it will come to define her.

In her quest for selection in Raglan, she’s up against 9 local men, and one woman to face the party.

So she swots up on Raglan’s issues. At the Parliamentary library she reads through local newspapers.

Marilyn visits each of the women on the final selection committee. At a visit to one of these women, Katherine O’Regan, Marilyn notices that Katherine’s toddler is crying while her mother is trying to cook scones and chat, and make tea for the men out in the farm.

Katherine recalled this in an interview for the documentary Who’s Counting?:

“I said well, look, if you don’t mind waiting a minute I’m just baking some scones to get out to the men in the field. And my daughter woke and was very fractious and I couldn’t do that and look after her and look after these scones and the orange juice and the sandwiches and things like that.

So Marilyn, bless her, said, ‘Come on Susan, we’ll take you out to the garden.’ They picked the white butterfly caterpillars from my rather eaten cabbages.”  

Marilyn’s noticing of women’s work was one small link in the chain of events that allowed an unexpected outsider to win a seat in Parliament.

“It was really exciting,” Katherine said. “The hall exploded—for those of us who were supporting Marilyn—it exploded with cheers. And we felt we had done something really very exciting. And, of course, we had.”

She’s age 23, one of only four women.

She works for the Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon. He’s a conservative strong man. He and Marilyn share a kind of understanding. And they do have certain things in common: ferocious intellects, belief in the role of the state safety net, and a refusal to be intimidated by anybody.

Marilyn discovers that the world of politicians is set up as if there is a wife at home managing travel, social events, and other administration.

“You haven’t got an unpaid wife at home answering the phone all the time. So I have an answering machine which directs them to a secretary in my electorate.

There are all sorts of allowances and things built into the system that are obviously for elderly gentlemen. You see, your spouse gets some travel allowances. And if your spouse—if you don’t happen to have a spouse—then you have to get the Prime Minister’s permission for the person to whom you wish to delegate this particular allowance. The really funny thing is that this allowance was instituted so the males might have hostesses in Wellington when they felt like it.

Well I think it’s daft. Because, you know, I want to host in Wellington when I feel like it. And I’m not going to nominate someone for three years at my age. That’s ridiculous.”

At the Parliament restaurant, Bellamy’s, she sits with the male MPs, the Members of Parliament. She later writes, “lunch can be a gross experience.”

MP No 1: How can you legislate against rape in marriage? It couldn’t be implemented.

MP No 2: That’s not the point — why should you be able to rape your wife in the bedroom but not beat her up in the kitchen?

MP No 3: Then beat her up in the bedroom and rape her in the kitchen!

Honourable Members: Ha ha ha

She asks the Government about women’s unpaid contributions to New Zealand.

The Minister of Statistics says, “services of housewives and household maintenance … are relatively unimportant in a developed economy.”

Three years later, Prime Minister Robert Muldoon is appointing new positions. Robert Muldoon is widely known as a bully. Marilyn starts to feel physically ill when confronting him. Her hairs stand on end. The pit of her stomach feels nauseated.

But he gives her one break. Muldoon appoints Marilyn as the chair of the Public Expenditure Select Committee, a group of politicians that scrutinize the finances and the economic accounting of the country.

So Marilyn Waring asks Treasury and Statistics officials directly. Why is caregiving excluded?

What about someone scraping a gutter clear, or voluntarily painting the lines of the community tennis court? Why aren’t those part of the country’s production?

As Marilyn says in the documentary Who’s Counting?:

“I developed the art of the dumb question. I was amazed all the time. They would wheel out these papers. And they were all full of these jargon economic phrases, and I  didn’t understand what they meant. So I would wait until it was my turn. And I would say, ‘What does so-and-so mean?’ You know, and they would give you an answer. And I would say, ‘Do you have any English that you can explain that in? Any real words?

“And I can still recall interchanges when they were briefing me in my office, and they would teach me something, and I would say, ‘But that’s preposterous!’ Or, ‘That’s crazy!’ Or, ‘That’s ludicrous!’ And they would say to me, ‘Oh well, yes, it is, but those are the rules.’”

She’s told by officials she has some good points. But GDP is a recipe written up in the United Nations System of National Accounts.

“I couldn’t believe that these enormous paradoxes—or pathologies—that I was discovering were part of an international economic system. I thought maybe it’s just we make bad policy in New Zealand.  

“And I began to realise, it’s nothing to do with New Zealand. These are the rules everywhere.”

In 1982, still a politician, she drafts a paper for the UN, a tear-down of the United Nations System of National Accounts. She discusses the draft with the Treasury, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Department of Statistics, and a visiting senior statistician from Australia.

Marilyn writes, “His memo of reply to me—a classic of sexist economic assumptions—was one of the major incentives to write this book.”

While waging battles with statistics officials, she’s also standing up against the Prime Minister on a completely different issue.

In 1984, the Labour Party introduces a bill to ban nuclear-powered warships from entering New Zealand waters. Marilyn’s party, the National Party opposes to this bill. Marilyn defies her party and votes for the bill. Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, is furious.

It’s a major crisis for the ruling party, because they have a majority of only one person. Every single decision over the next year would be uncertain because Robert Muldoon wouldn’t know which way Marilyn was going to vote.

Robert Muldoon’s biographer Barry Gustafson describes Muldoon calling Marilyn into his office after a night of heavy drinking.

Muldoon … greeted her with something like, ‘You perverted little liar…’ Waring responded, ‘Those words leave your lips again and I’ll sue the shit out of you!’

Waring took off her trackshoes and put her feet on the coffee table right in front of Muldoon and started to crunch her apple.

The Prime Minister, after a night of drinking brandy, decides to hold an early election.

“That doesn’t give you much time to run up to an election Prime Minister?” Prime Minister Muldoon is asked.

“Doesn’t give my opponents much time to run up to an election does it?” Muldoon replies. “If they want me to lead a government, they’ll vote accordingly.  If they want the other bloke to lead a government, they’ll vote for him! That’s it! Right? Okay.”

She later told the New Zealand Listener that she deliberately provoked the Prime Minister into calling an election.

“I was 31. I knew what I was doing and why I was doing it.”

It’s an emotional farewell for Marilyn.

“Perhaps it’s not till you leave this place that you actually confront the private hell that it is for a woman to be here. I think when you are here you can’t ever let yourself feel it.

“Thank you for coming. Thank you for letting me be myself here. Thank you for letting me go. Hope we have a great night.”

Marilyn knows intimately how little women are valued by politicians. So she wants to confront the rules that make up GDP. She needs to go to the source.

She flies to New York. She takes a taxi to the library at the UN. There’s a room she’s trying to find.

The librarian tells Marilyn that she has only ever seen one person enter that room. That person was Richard Stone, the author of the System of National Accounts.

Inside, Marilyn studies the wall of texts explaining how to calculate GDP. How to count bread production, how meat exports add up, and how to subtract imported oil.

The books explain why they don’t include domestic work or unpaid care. As Marilyn says in the documentary Who’s Counting?:

“The worst day of all was when I discovered the paragraph ‘Subsistence production and the consumption of their own produce by non-primary producers is of all little or no importance.’”

Tears well up in Marilyn’s eyes as she reads and re-reads this line.

“What this really means is that the work of non-primary producers—housewives, mothers—who are bearing and raising children, doing laundry, making home preserves, keeping a herb garden—in fact, most of the work that women do in an unpaid capacity—anywhere on the planet, macroeconomically, is of ‘little or no importance’.”

She’s still seeking permission to write this book that she’s been working towards for years.

“I went to talk to John Kenneth Gailbraith, and he said to me, ‘Look, for goodness’ sake, write it. You know enough, you’ve read enough, just write it!’”

So she returns to her hometown. She writes in the bach—thats, beach house—of Katherine O’Regan, the woman she had impressed a decade earlier with taking her daughter out to see caterpillars.

She writes.

The only sounds are the early dawn chorus and the roaring of the waves … I consider the hills rising directly from the sea. They were once covered in thick native bush, which must have been non-productive, for it was burned or cleared off. Now thousands of pine trees inch their way to a harvest at twenty years. That will make them ‘productive’. As they are—untouched, unscathed—they have no value. That’s what the international economic system says.

My tenancy of this house is unproductive.

“I choose to eat the feijoas, tamarillos, and apples from the domestic garden, items of no value. All in all, I seem to be having a very worthless sort of day—like the beach, the birds, and the clear and unpolluted skies.

Day after worthless day, Marilyn writes.

“The system was developed by John Maynard Keynes and Richard Stone, based on a pamphlet they wrote called, literally, The British National Income and How to Pay for the War. And this became the basis of national  income accounting.”

Marilyn points out how a single-minded focus on GDP can lead us astray.

Take an organization like the UN, deciding on how to distribute aid money to a sub-Saharan African country. The people handing out aid have choices about what they spend the money on. Let’s say there’s one intervention, an irrigation system, that could raise the productivity of land by 10%. And another, a gas powered stove, that could save a woman 5 hours each day preparing a wood stove. The irrigation saves the family maybe 5 hours a week. The gas stove saves the family 5 hours a day. But only the irrigation system counts for GDP. A massive increase in the productivity of housework doesn’t directly show up in productivity statistics.

That’s one example.

What’s measured isn’t just what the world values; what the world values also reflects what’s measured.

But it’s amazing how many objections there are. And once one objection is taken care of, new objections seem to be found.

One argument is that GDP is just measuring different things. It’s purposefully narrow. It’s not a for things like tax planning, predicting price inflation or—what John Maynard Keynes and Richard Stone’s initial goal was—figuring out how to pay for war. Housework is great, sure, but it won’t pay for the war.

Others argue that it’s convenient to focus on the kinds of work men do. Colin Clark and Margaret Haswell write in 1970, “The most convenient unit of measurement is the number of hectares of cultivated land per adult male engaged in agriculture.”

Or that women’s work can’t be measured consistently. Clark and Haswell again: “As the method of recording women’s labour varies so greatly between countries, the only statistically safe procedure is to work on male labour only.”

Marilyn Waring destroys this fiction using the example of Lesotho.

About half of the Lesothan men are absent from the country at any given time. Most of them working in mines in South Africa. There are twice as many literate women as men; and more women than men hold professional positions in the governmentment and participate in local politics.

Marilyn says that this issue of sexist assumptions and biased measurement really impacts on what is delivered by international development organisations:

But agricultural training is still predominantly given to rural men, who subsequently migrate to South Africa, while women are trained in home economics. Despite the fact that in most cases women perform all agricultural tasks.

And many people, many economists, many male economists, have been convinced that’s it would be a great thing to add the value of things like unpaid domestic work. But it’s just too hard to do on a large scale.

But Marilyn writes:

[D]omestic services—their full possible range from prostitution to health care to maintenance worker to counsellor to domestic servant—are the production of goods and services that in the general (i.e., male) case are marketed.

Yes, it’s not easy to approximate this monetary value. But statisticians also calculate the grey economy – under-the-table cash jobs for builders. They even estimate the size of the drug economy. What these share in common is that they’re typically paid for by men, not that they’re easy to measure.

So what can be done?

As Gloria Steinem writes, “Unlike many apocalyptic writers, Marilyn Waring does not seek the moral superiority of singing the blues and being a messenger of doom. On the, contrary, she tells us exactly what we could do.”

Definitions of work can change. Time use surveys can be introduced. An approximation of the value that women bring in unpaid work can be estimated and built into GDP.  Women can be made visible.

It sounds, as one statistician put it, polemic.

Counting for Nothing is published in 1988.

Her book is endorsed by the New York Times, reviewed by the Financial Times. Scrutinized by the Economist magazine.

At the American Economic Association’s 1990 conference in Washington, D.C., a piece of paper circulates. Taking advantage of the large crowd, the audience is invited to join a mailing list for a new organisation. This organisation will mesh together two disciplines with a fractious history: feminism and economics.

This is the start of the International Association for Feminist Economics. And its founding text is Counting for Nothing. 87 names are collected. A month later, the first letter from what will be called the International Association for Feminist Economics is mailed out.

The Association’s founding text, it is said, is Counting for Nothing.

And in 1993, following pressure to address the sexism inherent in the National Accounts, the UN finally accepts that a system of satellite accounts, one that takes into account the value of child care, elder-care, cooking and cleaning, it could be a useful addition. It’s a start.

Now, Marilyn is a professor at the Auckland University of Technology. And her views on the inclusion of domestic work in GDP have subtly changed.

Instead of imposing on the world a new GDP-plus, a GDP that commodifies domestic work, she points to well being circles, genuine progress indicators that can be customised to whatever a local community values.

Marilyn Waring still sees the valuing of domestic work as critical for making a fairer and more just world. But she is less concerned about this getting this established in market-based systems like the National Accounts. In a speech in Turkey she says it is a “pathological system.”

Time use surveys, she says, are one way to gain attention to invisible work. To get men to reflect how imbalanced the time split is between genders. Faced with the figures, maybe they would start should pick up the vacuum cleaner more. Maybe they would take time off work for caring for their parents. And, in that way, they’ll see value with both eyes.  

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Thanks to Marilyn Waring and Udayan Mukherjee for reviewing a draft script.

A key resource on Marilyn Waring is the documentary Who’s Counting?

You can download an mp3 of this podcast episode here.

Subscribe to Grid Lines on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or your favourite podcast app.

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References

Clark, Colin and Margaret Haswell. 1970. The Economics of Subsistence Agriculture: Fourth Edition. London: Macmillan.

Espiner, Guyon. 2012. “Interview: Marilyn Waring.” The New Zealand Listener, 3 December. Accessed from [https://www.noted.co.nz/archive/listener-nz-2012/interview-marilyn-waring/].

Gustafson, Barry. 2000. His Way: A Biography of Robert Muldoon. Auckland: Auckland University Press.

Hill, Kim. 2015. “Marilyn Waring: 40 Years of Feminism.” Radio New Zealand National, 7 March. Accessed from [http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/20169982/marilyn-waring-40-years-of-feminism].

Nash, Terre (Director). 1995. Who’s Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics. National Film Board of Canada. Accessed from [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS2nkr9q0VU].

New Zealand Herald. 2014. “Twelve Questions: Dr Marilyn Waring.” New Zealand Herald, 12 June. Accessed from [https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11272095].

Waring, Marilyn. 1984. “A letter to my sisters.” The New Zealand Listener, 26 May. Available at [https://www.noted.co.nz/archive/listener-nz-2012/a-letter-to-my-sisters/].

———. 1988. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth. Wellington: Allen & Unwin Port Nicholson Press.

———. 2012. “Making visible the invisible: Commodification is not the answer.” Speech to the AWID International Forum in Istanbul, Turkey. Available at [https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/marilyn-waring/making-visible-invisible-commodification-is-not-answer].

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Music

This episode uses the following music:

girlboss – Summer Goth  

girlboss – The Gottage

Jack Hooker – Graduation

Jack Hooker – She Moves in Circles

Jack Hooker – Stones and Drones

Wet Wings – Brute

It also uses music performed by Marilyn Waring as a singer, with Joan Howard, Bruce Chandler, Barry Mora, June Brain (clarinet), Ross Harris (horn), and Gary Brain (percussion):

Noster, Pater. 1973. Body. Bach Choir, conducted by J Body and J Hawley. Accessed from [http://www.radionz.co.nz/concert/programmes/resound/audio/20144549/body-pater-noster].

All other music composed and performed by Darian Woods.