Our Economy Is Ruled By Men
What I watched: We all play by economic rules set by men. What could a feminist economics look like?. Directed by Terre Nash, featuring Marilyn Waring. Article published July 21, 2022.
Anyone with their eyes open, viewing the world objectively, should realize that even in the best of societies we live in a patriarchal world. Some cultures are better at elevating women to being closer to men in terms of rights and opportunities. Some cultures are relatively horrific for women.
The United States often pretends we’re a far more equal country when it comes to parity for men and women and compared to some countries we are. But we all just witnessed our Supreme Court yank a 50-year cherished right to reproductive freedom from women (and anyone with reproductive capacity) in a clear signal that men still rule our country with a legislative and judicial iron fist.
Inequality between women and men has been rather obvious to me for quite some time. I’m not brain dead. I see what transpires before my eyes every day. To claim there is equality between men and women is the ultimate in salving with robust cognitive dissonance the day-to-day reality we all witness.
So, when this extended excerpt of a longer 1995 feature-length documentary, Who’s Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics, directed and edited by Terre Nash, crossed my path, I watched it knowing I already accepted the contention that attaining women’s equality in the world’s economy had a long way to go. But the video had much more to reveal to me on that subject.
Much of the documentary is based on Warning’s book, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics.
The documentary follows the investigations and activism of Marilyn Waring, New Zealand’s youngest ever member of parliament in 1973 at age 23, where she eventually ended up being the chair of that country’s Public Expenditure Committee. Through her work on that Committee, Waring ended up traveling to the United Nations to do research and then visited more than 35 countries. In each country she followed a local woman through her average day and it was through a combination of her research and hearing these women’s stories that she came to her conclusions.
Waring came to realize that a certain set of misplaced values regarding the work of men and women governed not only New Zealand’s economy, but the entire worldwide economic structure.
Much of Waring’s viewpoint developed after her visit to the United Nations library to which her prior investigations kept pointing her. She was there to research the United Nations System of National Accounts, a set of rules by which all countries must abide. At the time there was nowhere else to read the full set of these rules except in the United Nations library. Every day she read disheartening information in these volumes.
And every day or two I’d find yet another truly horrendous paragraph that meant I had to keep going. The worst day of all was when I discovered the paragraph “Subsistence production and consumption of their own produce by non-primary producers is of little or no importance.” What this really means is that the work of non-primary producers, housewives, mothers, who are bearing and raising children, doing laundry, making home preserves, keeping a herb garden, in fact most of the work that women do in an unpaid capacity, anywhere on the planet, macro economically is of little or no importance.
After Waring spent about two months reading through the United Nations System of National Accounts, she realized that the distortion that was in the UN rules and what occurred in real life was so extreme that it made her question her investigations, that perhaps she was missing some other piece of the puzzle.
Eventually, Waring decided to talk to famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith about her findings. Galbraith told Waring to start writing about it immediately. When Galbraith recounted his chats with Waring, he pointed out a sad reality of economic theory.
The whole tendency in economics is to take the monetary economy, the pecuniary economy, not only as the basic thing to be measured – if there isn’t money involved, if there isn’t a price, you don’t measure it – and that leaves women’s work in the household and a great deal of childcare and so forth out of the national accounts.
The modern economic system that changed the underlying theory and practice of macroeconomics and economic policies of governments was developed by John Maynard Keynes. (Waring credits Richard Stone also.) Modern economic systems emanated from Keynes book, How to Pay for the War that eventually became the basis for national income accounting, the United Nations System of National Accounts that ultimately governs all of our lives.
All nations are required to conform to these rules for economic measurement. If they don’t, they can’t belong to the United Nations, borrow from the World Bank, or secure loans from the International Monetary Fund. These rules end up determining the outcome of many government decisions and those outcomes end up impacting every single one of us. Whose economic needs are met first? How should your tax dollars be spent? Are we going to keep killing the planet? Who will live or die? Such is the power of these United Nations rules.
However, the measurements codified in the rules don’t include everything and are high selective. Only those things that go through the official marketplace are counted and measured. Those things that have a cash-generating capacity. Money is the only thing measured. How that money is made is of no concern.
This means that there is no value to peace. This means there is no value to the preservation of natural resources for future generations. This means there is no value to unpaid work including the unpaid work of reproducing human life itself including the unpaid work of women who feed and nurture their own families. This system cannot respond to values it refuses to recognize. This system leaves out the work of half the population of the planet, and the planet itself. It is the cause of massive poverty, illness and death of millions of women and children, and it is encouraging environmental disaster. This is an economic system that can eventually kill us all.
Let’s consider the horrible death and destruction taking place around the world right now as I write this because of the extreme heat scenarios manifesting in the United States, Europe, China, and elsewhere. I believe we can draw a direct line between our economic system of measurements and the inequalities it fosters to the climate change disaster we are now all sadly facing head on.
During her time on New Zealand’s Public Expenditure Committee, Waring continually probed her more experienced Committee and government counterparts for plain, direct explanations for documents replete with legal, economic, and governmental jargon. As she learned more about economics, Waring was struck by how preposterous some of the laws and policies were, but she was told that those were the rules and that’s just how it is.
I couldn’t believe that these enormous paradoxes, pathologies, that I was discovering were part of an international economic system. I thought maybe we make bad policy in New Zealand. Other countries started to invite me there as their guest and when you went there you could ask to see the chair people of public accounts committees, treasury boards, their budget appropriations committees, and I began to realize it had nothing to do with New Zealand. These are the rules everywhere and I developed very earlier a kind of personal technique which was in any community that I went into I’d ask until I was introduced to a woman my age. And I would try and develop a trust in that situation and then on a number of occasions spend an entire day with her, telling my little tape recorder what she was doing all the time and taking photographs of her.
Waring recounts meeting a young 14-year old woman in Zimbabwe. Waring was interested in the workday of young women because the international labor organizations specified that those under 14-years old don’t work.
In villages such as Warning visited in Zimbabwe, it was the path of the sun, daylight, and darkness that determined the workday of the village’s residents. Waring could identify no leisure moments for women in the often 16-18 hour days, 7 days a week, in these villages. All of the work activities that took place during these long days were unrecorded. The existing economic system would consider such time unproductive, uneconomic – essentially marked as leisure in what was in reality arduous, work-filled days.
Time is the one primary thing we all have to exchange, and time use best describes women’s lives anyway. There’s no reason why we could not do major census surveys in terms of time use just as we do census surveys for income.
Waring discusses a time use survey conducted in Pakistan. It was immediately evident after examining the results of the survey that there were drastic differences in the lifestyles of women and men. Men would engage in about five different activities during a day and women about a dozen. The activities women engaged in were often concurrent with child care or food preparation. The men’s days were much shorter than women’s. Men had lots of time for leisure and personal activities while women had very little.
For five hours each day on average, women were engaged in food preparation and cooking. This highlighted the extreme inefficiencies of their cooking methods. Therefore, the specific technology change that was necessary to drastically improve the productivity of the village were new stoves.
In Kenya, Waring discovered that the technology needed there was inexpensive water pumps to save the women time every day. A Kenyan woman told Waring about her average day. She’d walk five miles to fetch water. Upon returning she’d wash things for her children and cook the children food for school and the remainder of the day, Then she’d gather firewood for cooking. She had to tend the sheep and goats. Later the cattle would arrive and she had to milk the cows. She then spent her evenings worried about how she was going to get water for the next day. She did this every single day.
In one of the best demonstrations of the sexism firmly baked into our societies, Waring asked what the men in the village did. The women being interviewed laughed at the question, clearly acknowledging that they were fully aware they work a lot more than the men did.
A man in the crowd being interviewed answered that a man’s day is “quite hard.” They “supervise” the women and children because they come under a man’s authority. Then he has to decide who will herd the cattle (not that he will, just decide who will do it). Then he “worries” about how to get food for the family. Sounds like the men there had a much happier, simpler life on the backs of the women in their village. I wish that such stark denigration of women was less obvious today, but we see it all around us all the time. Maybe not with such harsh schisms of the male and female life experience as in Kenya, but rather obvious nonetheless.
Then Waring says something that I think sums up the crux of this issue succinctly.
It’s perfectly obvious that the people who are visible to you as contributors to the economy are the people who will be visible when you make policy. And if you’re not visible as a producer in a nation’s economy, then you’re going to be invisible in the distribution of benefits. And wherever I was this was the world situation for women.
Those who live in countries like the United States might counter that women are already being counted as part of our economy. But are they really? If we don’t have parity in companies, on corporate boards, and in professions historically dominated by men, how can we adequately count their contributions. If the culture still defaults to the assumption that the bulk of child rearing and household duties fall on women, how do we count all that work they do. Yes, some men share those responsibilities today, but I bet it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what women do in the average household. There are religions that stand by men’s dominance over women. Women are expected in those religions to follow the orders of men, and that’s certainly not going to turn out well for the women.
The magnitude of the invisibility of women’s work was a major lesson I learned from my parliamentary experience. For example, as a politician, it was virtually impossible for me to prove a need for childcare facilities. Mothers, who are inactive and unoccupied, cannot apparently be in need.
Waring says this to an audience during one of her speaking engagements.
Cathy, a young, middleclass housewife, spends her days preparing the food, setting the table, serving meals, clearing food from the table, washing dishes, ironing, keeping an eye on or playing with the children, disciplining children, taking the children to daycare or school, disposing of garbage, dusting, gathering clothes for the washing, doing the laundry, going to the gas station and supermarket, repairing household items, making beds, paying bills, sewing or mending or knitting, talking with door-to-door salespeople, cutting the grass, weeding, answering the telephone, vacuuming, sweeping and washing the floors, shoveling snow, cleaning the bathroom and kitchen, and putting her children to bed. Cathy has to face the fact that she fills her time in a totally unproductive manner.
She too is economically inactive and economists record her as unoccupied.
Waring then offers the daily workload of a man named Ben. The contrast between the man’s workday and the woman’s workday illustrates the built-in inequity women face in our economy. Ben is in paid work and economically active. His work has value unlike the work Cathy does.
In what appears to be the same speaking engagement address in Canada, Waring continues with this.
There is no reason why tomorrow Canada or New Zealand could not establish time use surveys because the one common denominator that all of us have, the one thing we might be said to choose to exchange that is our own, is time. And time is a better description of the needs for intervention in people’s lives than any other indicator. It shows you where the crisis points are. It shows you where the service needs are. As a policymaker.
Waring mentions a study conducted on the status of women in Canada, the results of which concluded that two thirds of all primary health care took place in the home.
If two thirds of the budget for primary health care were directed towards those responsible for that care, imagine what would happen to that budget, and how that budget would be redistributed, and how the priorities would be turned on their head.
These are the kinds of effects in a budgetary sense that would flow from time use surveys. Why don’t policymakers or politicians or bureaucrats like this idea? Well, first of all, it’s terrifying. They would have to exercise judgment. They don’t have a uni-dimensional set of figures to which they can look and say is growth up or down, thereby hangs our decision.
Language is a tool available to all of us. None of you when you leave this room should ever again say my mother doesn’t work, my wife doesn’t work. That particularly relates to people who are in media or teaching positions.
Waring continues to hammer home during her speech the ridiculous and damaging reality that women’s work is discounted. She advocates for census surveys to start documenting time usage and the types of work not normally captured by other surveys.
Then she suggests something to get political parties and politicians to listen to the needs of women, to begin to make sure previously undocumented work is indeed counted and applied to the overall view of the nation’s economy. But her suggestion applies to so much we have to do in order to compel parties and politicians to do the right thing by people. It seems we need to hear this now more than ever considering the state of our country’s political discourse and landscape.
Join political parties and go to their annual conferences and year after year after year drive them crazy. Half the candidates shall be women! Half the candidates shall be women! Join this party until you get it through, then move on to the next one.
Just as there is no one way feminism, there is no one political tactic available here. There is no one political strategy. It is as broad and as wide as our imaginations can take it once we have heard and seen and recognize that the emperor has no clothes.
You must choose, judge, assess, the strategy and tactic in your environment, in those communities that I don’t have access to. Just as I do it in communities you won’t have access to. I mean, the only principles are that we don’t stop, that we are rigorous, that we recognize that it’s hard work, and lastly and not least, that we have a lot of fun along the way.
I encourage you to watch the entire video. Share it around. Start conversations in your own circles about how we might reach better gender parity in our economic systems. And as Waring suggests, get deeply involved in the process in your political parties and in local, state, and federal elections, as well as with policy-making bodies that affect your community. It truly does take a village, and we are the village.
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