Waring wants to change the world

Press, 24 September 1988, Page 8

Waring wants to change the world

By

DEBORAH MCPHERSON

Marilyn Waring admits she still wants to change the world.

“I do, I want to change the world. I may not be in Parliament any more, but I’m still political.” Ms Waring, a women’s rights campaigner and former member of Parliament, has once again challenged the assumptions on which power rest with her latest book, “Counting for- Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Do." Ms Waring was in Christchurch yesterday for the Women’s Book Festival Week and to promote her book.

Women’s unpaid work, both productive and reproductive, fuelled the economies of every country in the world, yet no value was placed on this labour in the international system of national accounts, said Ms Waring.

This absence of the contribution of women’s work from the national accounts was a deliberate patriarchal, or maledominated, ideological bias, she said. In her book, Ms Waring explores the idea of placing a monetary value on unpaid labour, a process called imputing. At least three or four

economically reputable systems of imputing were available, she said. “The first thing that would happen, of course, is that the Gross Domestic Product would increase by 40 to 100 per cent, depending on the system of imputation. The only real issue was of compatibility with other countries, but that is not what measuring the domestic productivity is about. International comparisons are meaningless.” Economically, women’s experience was excluded or numbed by the language of economics, even

though women’s housework, fieldwork and childcare all contributed to the financial value of households. Motherhood was also reduced to a matter of welfare in Western economic theory, she said. “The international system of economics says war is very valuable and birth is worth nothing. It says smuggling heroin and pornographic movies adds to the growth of the economy, and that caring for children in our own home does not. “Women who continually get this message must finally start to believe it.” Filling in the census form was one of the few times when women were visibly confronted with the idea that they did not count in society, said Ms Waring. But women should continue to fill out census forms and list what unpaid work they did, even though traditionally housework was discounted as work, she said. “The economists and statisticians say they would have conceptual difficulties in measuring women’s unpaid work and giving it a monetary value, but it’s remarkable how many conceptual difficulties can be overcome if the producer is a man.”