PERSON
Marilyn Waring
New Zealand politician, scholar, and feminist economist (b. 1952) whose 1988 If Women Counted posed the question that reframed national accounting: why does the system that measures economic activity systematically exclude the work that sustains human life?
Marilyn Waring entered the New Zealand Parliament at age 23 in 1975 and served until 1984. During her parliamentary career, she chaired the Public Expenditure Committee, where she discovered that the UN System of National Accounts systematically excluded unpaid domestic labor from measurements of economic activity. The discovery produced If Women Counted (1988), a book whose influence on feminist economics, national accounting reform, and development policy has been sustained across four decades. Waring's critique was technical and devastating. The exclusion of household production was not a conceptual oversight — it was a structural feature of accounting systems designed by men who did not recognize the work of women as economic activity.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Waring's work catalyzed a generation of feminist economic scholarship. Julie Nelson, Nancy Folbre, Diane Elson, and others developed the theoretical frameworks that transformed household production measurement from marginal concern to core analytical question. The institutional responses — satellite accounts for