Dame Marilyn Joy Waring (born 7 October 1952) is a New Zealand public policy scholar, international development consultant, former politician, environmentalist, feminist and a principal founder of feminist economics.
In 1975, aged 23, she became New Zealand's youngest member of parliament for the centre-right New Zealand National Party. As a member of parliament she chaired the Public Expenditure Committee. Her support of the opposition Labour Party's proposed nuclear-free New Zealand policy was instrumental in precipitating the 1984 New Zealand general election, and she left parliament in 1984.
On leaving parliament she moved into academia; she is best known for her 1988 book If Women Counted, and she obtained a D.Phil in politics in 1989. Through her research and writing she is known as the principal founder of the discipline of feminist economics. Since 2006, Waring has been a professor of public policy at the Institute of Public Policy at AUT, focusing on governance and public policy, political economy, gender analysis, and human rights. She has taken part in international aid work and served as a consultant to UNDP and other international organisations.
She has outspokenly criticised the concept of gross domestic product (GDP), the economic measure that became a foundation of the United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA) following World War II. She criticises a system which "counts oil spills and wars as contributors to economic growth, while child-rearing and housekeeping are deemed valueless". Her work has influenced academics, government accounting in a number of countries, and United Nations policies. Waring has had a long-time involvement with the Association for Women's Rights in Development, a progressive feminist organisation that advocates inclusive feminism, and served on its board until 2012. In 2021 she was appointed by the World Health Organization as a member of the WHO Council on the Economics of Health For All.
Waring's work has been central to critiques of national income accounting, specifically in the exclusion of unpaid labour from measures such as gross domestic product. In her work, If Women Counted, she argues that current economic systems assign value primarily through market transactions, therefore excluding essential forms of labour such as childcare, elder care, and household work. Waring, Marilyn. If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics. Harper & Row, 1988. Waring states that this exclusion misrepresents economic priorities by recognising activities like military expenses, while ignoring the labour that is required for proper social reproduction. She further emphasises that unpaid work, disproportionately performed by women, supports the functioning of the formal economy.Waring, Marilyn. "Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth." Feminist Economics, vol. 5, no. 3, 1999, pp. 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1080/135457099337897 Her analysis has contributed to the development of alternative accounting frameworks, including time use surveys and satellite accounts, which aim to better explain the economic significance of labour that is not on the current market.
Early life Marilyn Waring grew up at Taupiri, where her parents owned a butchery. Her great-grandfather Harry (Arthur Henry) Waring had emigrated to New Zealand from Hopesay in Herefordshire, England, in 1881, and established the family butchery business at Taupiri. In 1927 Harry Waring stood unsuccessfully for election to parliament in the Raglan seat for the Reform Party, the forerunner of the National Party. Waring was a talented soprano in her youth, and her parents had hoped that she would become a classical singer. In 1973, Waring received an Honours BA in political science and international politics from Victoria University of Wellington.
Career
Political career
Waring joined the National Party while still a student at Victoria University. She joined because she supported National MP Venn Young, who introduced a private member's bill into parliament for homosexual law reform; this was opposed by Norman Kirk, the Labour Party Prime Minister. She quickly entered the Opposition Research Unit as a part-time advisor under George Gair, the Shadow Minister of Housing.
The 1972 to 1975 National Opposition had not had a single female member in its caucus. Exacerbated due to 1975 being International Women's Year, it was to deep embarrassment among the National Party's established figures that no women had been selected for any seats in the upcoming election. At age 22, Waring expressed some passing interest to Gair in standing for the party in the seat of Raglan, a very safe National seat that contained her hometown of Huntly. Gair anxiously called former Prime Minister Keith Holyoake to tell him about Waring's interest and origins in the area itself. An overjoyed Holyoake personally arrived within the hour to Parliament House, and offered her the selection without even formally introducing himself. The two thereafter became very close, to the extent that on one occasion she kissed Holyoake on the lips in front of cameras. She is thought to have helped soften Holyoake's ambivalent views on LGBT rights; after she was involuntarily outed by the New Zealand Truth in 1978, Holyoake worked with Prime Minister Robert Muldoon to quickly downplay the tabloid reports and to protect their friend.
Waring campaigned for selection by making house calls on party delegates, starting in her home town of Huntly, borrowing her mother's car (and some of her clothes). She mentioned her opposition to sporting ties with South Africa. 26 of the 130 voting delegates were women; including Katherine O'Regan who became her electoral agent for eight years. The other candidates were men: a County Council chair, a Meat and Wool Section chair of Federated Farmers, a National Party Divisional councillor and a popular local farmer who had stood as an independent in the 1972 election. The selection meeting was held at Ngaruawahia High School assembly hall (she went there her first two years of secondary school). She was the last candidate to speak; each was given two sealed envelopes with the same subject to speak on. Party president George Chapman's subject was agricultural incomes – "not her strong suit" – and Party leader Robert Muldoon's was housing policy; a patsy question as he knew she was working on housing policy with Gair (as she pointed out to the meeting).
When her selection was announced Waring thought there had been "a dreadful mistake" but there was a round of stand-up cheering and Jim Bolger from the neighbouring King Country electorate raced up and embraced her on stage. She was later told by a scrutineer that she was ahead from the first ballot, and slowly climbed to over 50%. Her selection reflected her "obvious ability and ... well-articulated convictions", but was helped because the two best-known local candidates disliked each other, and when one was eliminated his support went to Waring to prevent the selection of the other. One family block voted for her because another candidate had sold them a horse with a saddle sore concealed by a blanket.
Muldoon said at the subsequent party caucus meeting in Wellington how pleased he was that she made it: "We are going to win. I wanted a woman and I will help all I can". Holyoake agreed with Muldoon that "I haven't seen anything like it in 40 years." Aged 23, she was the youngest member of parliament at the time of her election.
Waring and Colleen Dewe (elected to the Lyttelton "swing" seat then held by Labour) were the fourteenth and fifteenth women elected as Members of Parliament in New Zealand. Waring was one of only two women in the government caucus and one of only four women elected in 1975. After the 1978 election she was the sole female government MP until Ruth Richardson was elected in 1981. Both Waring and Richardson were members of the Women's Electoral Lobby.
She fell out with Prime Minister Robert Muldoon almost immediately, and there were several episodes of conflict, although they also shared views on some issues such as welfare payments to single mothers, where Muldoon was a believer in the welfare state.
During her period in Parliament, she served as Chair of the Public Expenditure Committee, Senior Government Member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and on the Disarmament and Arms Control Committee. The appointment to the Public Expenditure Committee after the 1978 election was a considerable achievement for a member of only three years' standing. According to Barry Gustafson, Waring recalled that she 'just fell off my chair' when Muldoon, without any prior consultation, announced at caucus that she would be chairperson of the very influential Public Expenditure Committee. This was a major position for an MP of only three years' experience and even more so in light of Waring's youth and controversial first term. Muldoon, however, knew that Waring had similar views and values on the economy to his own and that she had the intellectual capacity and drive to cope with complex investigation and analysis. He was also well aware that she would not be intimidated by ministers or senior officials.
She also served on the Select Committee for Violent Offending, taking a particular interest in the Aroha Trust, formed by Black Power women. As a Member of Parliament, she was also the New Zealand Observer at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, and chaired the New Zealand Delegation to the OECD Conference on the Role of Women in the Economy in 1978.
The Raglan electorate was abolished in 1978: her home town of Huntly and Ngaruawahia were now in the Rangiriri electorate and Raglan was in the Waikato electorate. Waring moved to the Waipa electorate, one of the safest National seats in the country, which included the wealthy rural town of Cambridge and parts of the King Country.
Waring had come especially to disagree with the National Party policy over the issue of a nuclear-free New Zealand and, on 14 June 1984, she informed the leadership that she would vote independently on nuclear issues, disarmament issues, and rape but would continue to support the Government on confidence. Since the National Party had only a one-seat majority, the government would be likely (though not certain) to lose on an issue Muldoon regarded as one of national security.
That evening Muldoon decided to call a snap election to be held on 14 July (a general election was due at the end of the year). The election was a disaster for the National Party. Waring told Muldoon's biographer that she had deliberately sought to provoke Muldoon into this action.Waring interviewed by Gustafson, 24 February 1993, cited Gustafson, His Way p. 370 n. 33 and n. 38. The nuclear-free New Zealand legislation was subsequently enacted by the new Labour government. In her autobiography, The Political Years, she described laughing as Muldoon berated her in a parliamentary office, and recounted eating an apple to taunt him as Muldoon drank and grew enraged.
Jim Traue of the Alexander Turnbull Library asked if they could archive her papers; they did not normally archive MPs' papers (only Ministers') "but her collection would be different"; there were close to 400 cartons.
Academic work In 1984 Waring left politics and returned to academia, where her research has focused on feminist economics, well-being, human rights and on economic factors that influence legislation and aid.
In 1988 she published If Women Counted (originally published with an introduction by Gloria Steinem). The book has also been published as Counting for Nothing, but remains most widely known under the first title. It criticises the use of GDP as a surrogate for "progress," and argues that lacking valuation of women and nature drive decisions in globalisation that have unintended but terrible consequences for the world. According to Julie A. Nelson,