Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth
By Marilyn Waring
Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1997
(Originally: Allen & Unwin NZ, 1988)
$24.95
Review by Greg Ogle
It is 10 years since Marilyn Waring published Counting for Nothing, a book which Gloria Steinem said "changes our world view". Waring's book made accessible an environmental and feminist critique of mainstream economics, focusing on the way the economic system puts no value on women's work and makes much of that work invisible.
Crucial to the process of making women's economic contribution invisible, and the focus of Waring's work, was the international System of National Accounts (SNA). These are the rules for government statisticians in defining and measuring economic activity.
Waring was outraged that this system valued destructive activity like war and environmental damage, while ignoring much subsistence labour and unpaid work in the home — both of which were (and still are) done primarily by women.
Using examples from all over the world, Waring ridiculed the system which saw as "economically inactive" women who worked long hours providing the basic necessities of life, while valuing the "work" of the men in the missile silos with their fingers on the nuclear button or the "productive" voyage of the Exxon Valdez, which resulted in an ecological disaster (but a very productive one, because gross domestic product was increased by the oil clean-up, ship repair, government administration and environmental restoration).
Waring's work drew on nearly 20 years of feminist scholarship on counting women's work and also on older debates from national accountants themselves.
However, the book did two important things. First, it popularised this feminist critique of the national accounts. The book is now in its eighth reprint, and Waring has toured the world arguing her case. Her ideas have been made into a video, Who's Counting: Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics, which has been shown on television (not a usual occurrence when talking about the national accounts!). The international network of organisations and women who lobby for measuring unwaged work, the International Women Count Network, built their name around the initials of Waring's book, alternatively published as If Women Counted.
Waring's work also exposed the myths of objectivity and the "scientific nature" of national accounts statistics. Conservative economists and statistical agencies argued against incorporating values for non-market work into the national accounts because of the supposed need to maintain the scientific base of the accounts. They cited the methodological and data difficulties of estimating a value for work where there was no "objective" measure like a market price.
Waring demonstrated with numerous examples that such difficulties were no more extreme than existed in other cases where estimates of non-market production were made by statistical agencies — often by the same statisticians and agencies who argued that it was too hard. If economics was about empirical observation, as mainstream economics argued, then its failure to reflect women's reality was a damning criticism.
More than that, Waring gave many examples of how this continued invisibility of women's work distorted and undermined development programs. She argued that if women's work as producers and reproducers was invisible as a contribution to the national accounts, then women would be invisible in the distribution of benefits. This theme now flows through much of the literature on women and/in development.
Much has changed since Waring first published Counting for Nothing. The importance of women in the economy, especially in underdeveloped economies, is recognised in a variety of government and non-government programs, including in the United Nations and even the World Bank — although we could argue about the effectiveness of their "women's program".
In 1995 the UN Human Development Report produced an alternative index of development, an implicit recognition of the limitations of the traditional economic measure of GDP per capita. That report also estimated that unwaged and under-waged work was worth some $16 trillion internationally — over two-thirds of which was done by women. There have been a range of other official, semi-official and private estimates of non-market production.
Perhaps even more importantly, in 1993 the United Nations, in conjunction with the major international financial organisations, issued the long-awaited revision to the SNA. It was the first major revision since 1968 and recommended that a structure of satellite accounts be established to record non-market production and for environmental accounting.
These satellite accounts would remain separate from the main national accounts. According to the UN, this separation in accounts was to "prevent flows used for the analysis of market behaviour and disequilibria from being swamped by non-monetary flows".
This step was welcomed by many feminists, but I question such optimism for a number of reasons. First, there is the distance between decision and implementation.
In Australia the development of such satellite accounts was not included in the timetable for the implementation of the 1993 SNA changes, and their implementation is reliant on available funds, although some progress has been made on environmental accounts. If this is the case in Australia, it does not augur well for less wealthy countries.
It is more important, though, to note that the goal of these changes is "satellite" accounts. By definition these are separate and peripheral. The national accounts, with their exclusion of non-market production, remain central and "the economy" will continue to be defined by the market and the "public" domain.
Despite the 10 years of progress since Waring wrote, women's unpaid work is still not counted in the economy. In this sense, Waring's work remains as relevant today as when it was written.
It is also the case that the social problems which Waring sought to address — war, environmental destruction, poverty, gendered social inequality and underdevelopment — all remain with us. Indeed, the economic restructuring of the last decade has made many of these problems worse.
But if Waring's concerns remain relevant, and her book historically important, unfortunately her analysis was deeply flawed.
Waring saw a conspiracy of economists, statisticians and politicians who sought to impose "male values" of war and power onto the national accounts and render women's work invisible. Such an analysis fails to see the fundamental market base of the national accounts, which grew out of neo-classical and Keynesian economic theory.
Rather than because of a conspiracy, the accounts exist the way they do because they provide information for governments managing the economy according to these economic theories. Not surprisingly, Marxist national accounts are very different — although generally they have not included non-market production either.
Nevertheless, the question Waring ultimately asks is a good one: if the accounts reflect a systemic sexism, and those sexist structures must be maintained to preserve the usefulness of the accounts for economic management, the real question is usefulness to whom, and for what policy ends?
Or put another way: why should feminists, or for that matter socialists, use these national accounts when arguing about economic policy? Too many radical economists simply accept such ground rules set by orthodox economics without question.
Waring may be remembered as one who championed the cause of "counting women's work" in the national accounts, but she was better than that. For all the flaws in her analysis, she reached what I think was a good conclusion: that if we really want a people-friendly and environmentally friendly economic system, we need to begin to think about the economy in terms of people and things (natural and manufactured), not in terms of markets.
Mainstream economics has little to offer to such a vision of the economy — or society.