Why is marilyn waring important

If we had decent time use studies in New Zealand, the unpaid sector would be bigger than dairying, it would be bigger than tourism. Dr Marilyn Waring. She also lays out a vision for what a new, genuinely transformative economic measure of time use would look like.

Dr Waring stamped many marks during her political career, the most famous of which was when she informed her leader - Prime Minister Robert Muldoon - that she would cross the floor and vote for Labour's nuclear-free legislation, at a time when National held a one-seat majority in government.

Muldoon had been drinking heavily. That of course sparked Muldoon's decision to call a snap election that night He was looking for a reason to call an early election for ages, he was looking, looking, looking.

Robert Muldoon campaigning, Photo: Ministry of Culture and Heritage. Podcast MP3 Oggcast Vorbis. From Sunday Morning , am on 16 December Tags: author interview Marilyn Waring Still Counting economics inequity unpaid work women's work. Get the RNZ app for easy access to all your favourite programmes. They identify three approaches that might help in doing this: recognition of the vulnerability of the human condition; evaluating economic policy in light of the human rights obligations of governments; and collective action to govern the use of common resources, such as land, water and climate.

Julie Aslaksen and Charlotte Koren show, with examples from Norway, how unpaid household work can be made visible to economists through measurement in comparable terms to components of the Gross Domestic Product.

This requires data from surveys of time use and a willingness to impute a money value to the hours spent on unpaid household work. However, as shown in the chapter by Johanna Varjonen and Leena Kirjavainen, there is no guarantee that policy makers will take such estimates into account. They explain that Finland also has estimates of the monetary value of unpaid household production. In this was estimated by Varjonen and others as equivalent to 39 per cent of GDP.

However, the official statistics for Finland did not incorporate such estimates and economists did not use them in their analysis and policy advice. Some feminists are particularly unhappy with the idea of imputing a money value to unpaid work, fearing that this distorts and devalues work that is not done for money, and in which love often plays a vital role. Some readers of Feminist Review may share that view—if so, I urge them to read this book, and see whether their view remains the same.

I think it would have been useful if we had been able to mobilise statistics on unpaid work in examining the impact of austerity on women in Europe but this has not been possible because the surveys required to construct them—time use studies—are not conducted on a regular basis.

It is a scandal that European governments can produce quarterly estimates of employment in paid work but not in unpaid work.

Despite many valiant efforts, women do not as yet really count in the conduct of economic policy. This book is an imaginative contribution to an ongoing struggle. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Reprints and Permissions. Elson, D. Fem Rev , e9—e11 Download citation. Published : 19 February Issue Date : 01 February