If Women Counted
Summary
While the work done by men outside the home is always acknowledged and included in the productivity figures of the economy, the contribution of women is always neglected and not cared for. Many economists have termed the neglect of women in the global economic activity as a sexist outrage that needs to be corrected. According to some analysts, neglecting the contribution of women to the society is equal to neglecting the intellectual property of a corporate entity. In both the developed and developing countries, a number of transactions are removed from the active economy and are do not involve any transfer of money from one person to the other.
Marilyn Waring (Waring), who was the former parliament member of New Zealand was one of the vocal critics of the way in which productivity of a country is calculated without taking the contribution of women into consideration. In the year 1988, Waring wrote a book called ‘If Women Counted’ on the importance of counting the contribution of women to the national and global productivity. The main themes of the book are political economy, academic feminism, and feminist economics. The book was very well received in the market and critiqued the system of national accounts, global standards used for measuring growth, and how the unpaid work of Women and the value provided by nature are excluded from calculating the productivity of an economy. Economists and analysts hailed the book as ground breaking in the way it suggested a change in the way productivity of an economy is calculated.
If Women Counted succeeded in single handedly founding a sub-discipline of economics called feminist economics. Suggestions made in the make made the United Nations to change the way in which it calculated Gross Domestic Product. The book had also inspired new methods of accounting in many countries across the world.
‘If Women Counted’ is a popular book on the basics of economics and the traditional assumptions behind the national accounting systems. The book has detailed elucidations on a varied number of topics such as labor economics, environmental issues, statistical surveys, and background of public accounting. In summary, all the popular topics that were already part of conventional economics are studied afresh under the lens of a new sub discipline of economics.
The immediate question that confronts us is what might be the opinion of the new discipline of feminist economics? The perceived motivation of the Waring can be mentioned in short as: Economics as a discipline had been practiced for generations is part of an elaborate arrangement designed by men to methodically dominate and suppress women. Waring opines that it part of an elaborate scheme to put the females in ‘their place’. For instance, by failing to recognize the monetary value created by the production services of a women, the contribution made by women in the form of household labor is cut out from both the sides of product accounts and national income of a country. The book emphasizes that the practice is followed in both the developing and developed countries around the world without any exception. In the book, Waring also highlights the lack of a system that focuses on the proper valuation of volunteered services contributed by women and the ‘investment’ made by women to the future of the country in the form of reproduction and child-rearing activities.
The core essence of the work can be understood from the following quote, “The rhetoric of these accounts (UNSNA) is so removed from us (women), and requires so much in the translation, that it is difficult to breathe any life onto the page when trying to demystify them. Yet demystify them we must, because the UNSNA is an essential tool of the male economic system. So I will have to trust my sisters to stay with the text and trust. . . I show how this system (mis)treats our lives ” (Waring 7). Waring makes sincere and systematic attempts to unravel the background history by the national accounting standards that are implemented in different countries by conducting interviews with some of the key economists and statisticians. However, all the economists and statisticians were found to be males who are interested in restricting the women to their homes. The author was unsuccessful in interviewing Nancy Ruggles who was very well known in the global accounting world when the book was being drafted.
The book by Waring is not only path breaking by really unique due to its position as a mere primer of a budding discipline of Feminist Economics but also because it presents a well balanced picture of the views expressed by some other experts in the field like Eisner (1988) and Peskin (1982).
The book primarily deals with the term’ national accounts’ which refer to NIPA (national income and product accounts) and NIPA’s close counterparts. As the book was written keeping the developed nations, the current will also limit itself to the analysis of the western markets. One of the prime concerns of the author that I have found all through the books was the lack of measurement of house hold services related to production by the concerted officials. The book is very insightful in that it mentions a number of top accountants who were functioning individually without following the global accounting standards have done such kind of measurements. However, a disappointing thing about this revelation is that there is a dearth of recognition regarding the work of these national accountants in UNSNA. I personally believe that the argument made by Waring is totally on the right direction. In an age when companies are trying to measure worth of their human resources and intellectual property rights, governments around the world too should include proper measurements for measuring the non-market labor done in households done by women. Including non-market labor in the measurement of a country’ GDP would help in correctly interpreting the trends in the changes in the country’s GDP levels. When the changes in the economies of a number of advanced countries around the world are analyzed properly, one of the most interesting observation would the growth in participation of women in the economy’s labor force. At times when women go out of their households and arrive in the labor markets, the non-market activity that they were doing in their homes would be substituted by the market activity that will be included as part of the country’s GDP. The officially measured GDP then might get biases and give wrong results as the additional contribution of a woman who entered the market economy was just a substitution of the non-market production she was doing before. In such cases, the best way to remove the bias is by having an official measure of the non-market domestic activity by the women.
In the book the author points out some of the arguments against the measurement of non-market production activity like difficulty in standardizing the non-market production activity and difficulty in quantifying such productivity. Another reason pointed out be the author is the difficulty in standing up to detailed enquiry. Waring points out that the justifications given for not measuring the non-market productivity is hallow and shows the lack of concern for the household work done by women and the resulting dearth of creativity among the people working in the related areas. But the feminism of the author is a bit misplaced as a lot of household like shopping and gardening is also done by men. The main argument of the author is justified in principle. When a proper analysis f the working habits of people in USA are analyzed it can be found that the quantum of household work done by males in USA has increased from a number of 11. 7 till 13.4 hours per each week while the amount of work done by employed females in USA had fallen from 32.3 hours to 27.7 hours. Even though men do not actively pursue some activities like children rearing and cooking, their involvement in house renovation and house-budgeting has increased tremendously. Waring’s book fails to give a good understanding of these changing trends in the global work order.
A crucial theme that is dealt in depth in the book by Warring is the issue related to the measurement of the worth of volunteer labor services that are unpaid. I found that the argument given by the author on this issues a bit ambiguous. The author is again impacted by feminist bias and she expected that it only the women who do volunteer work. Data from Canada and other developed western countries clearly reveals that the share of women in voluntary labor is only 55 percent and men do the remaining 45 percent volunteer work. The issue that is missed out by Warring is pertinent here as the absence of authorized measurement of the imputed service values related to the labor force which volunteered leading to a distortion and the low representation of private sector of the economy. In fact, many boards that specify accounting standards across the world now the value of labor services contributed by the volunteers must be included in the key accounting statements of the respective organizations.
The growing importance of the private not for profit sector is highly important, and merits a separate analysis above the conventional contrast between the private sector which works for profits and the government sector. In the book, If Women Counted, Warring deserves as special credit for putting her on this crucial aspect. The issue can have a lot of main inferences for the public policy. But a well-adjusted analysis of this issue shows that there could be no inferences to economic feminism as emphasized by the author.
I give special credit for Warring for her insightful assessment of secret assumptions behind the statistical surveys. Even though this section of work is not so well conceptualized, a lot of inherent suggestions could be easily identified. As more and more people in the developed world now prefer to be self-employed from their respective homes, it can be said with a degree of certainty whether the standard census are surveys are properly sensitive.
I also give credit for Warring for taking into consideration that the household surveys conducted by the government and other non-governmental organization allow a lot of sexual discrimination where the unit which needs to report selected is the household head rather than as a mere member of the house. There is a pertinent to decipher and analyze the statistical report of households in order to be extra delicate to the individual responses in the contemporary household as many of the individuals in the household very less information about the same members of the household.
One of the major themes that continue to be highly persistent all over the book is the wide spread gender inequality in the national accounting. The author emphasizes that such conditions are prevalent in the developing nations. One of the main reasons for this bias is the attempts by the statisticians to perceive a production boundary along same lines for both the developing and developed countries. In case the households of the developing nations are not taken into consideration, then the authorized numbers might seem to be deceptive. The dominant role played by women is that kind of households and manufacture of rudimentary goods that are non-marketed in backward nations could be ignored in a way that is discriminatory. I opine that the argument made in work by Waring that is briefly summarized here seems to be very valid.
While the author gives a number of suggestions regarding the need to improve the accounting system, it is better not to look for any practical explanations to the accounting and problems related to statistics in the book ‘If Women Counted’. However, the author clearly emphasizes that the accountants and statisticians were delaying the action when there is a need to put proper standards related to the important issue related to feminists. It can be easily summarized in other words as a tendency of shifting the blame. To make this clear, I give the following argument given by the author in the book: “The policymakers said that they could only work with and from, the economists' models and the statisticians' figures. The economists said that they worked within policy guidelines that required particular statistics. And the statisticians said that they just produced the figures the policymakers and the economists' models required of them. No one, it seems, is responsible for the dismal state of economics” (Waring 92).
Moreover, the author also argues thatthe traditionally accepted views of the founder of national economic accounting Mr. Milton Gilbert leaves no way for alternative perceptions, for bringing about change, for making the system more flexible, and towards the human response to life (Warring 57).
Conclusion
The book by Waring successfully demonstrates that the conventional accounting systems for calculating the national income and other public accounts have a lot of limitations and should be interpreted very carefully. I too agree with the arguments made by the author that the traditional measures for calculating the GDP of a country are overrated and given more importance than they deserve. Warring’s seminal work in feminist economics woke up people and regulators from the wrong perception that work that is traditionally done by women in households is of immense value and should not be ignored while compiling the accounts for calculation the country’s GDP and growth figures. Despite the minor limitation of being over feminist sometimes, her work helped us in preserving, valuing, and rewarding the work of women that makes our lives easy.
National income and product accounts that are used by many countries in the present form exclude some of the vital aspects of a country’s economy that could be of immense value for the purpose of economic policy and with the objective of tracking the economic trends sweeping around the world. Many of the survey techniques and indicators used to check reliability are no longer relevant and were developed with the objective of confidentiality surrounding them. Some of the elements like ‘forced-consistency’ that are publicly available in accounts were in contravention to the actual economic behavior. I personally believe that the time when the state of the economy could be measured with a single GDP figure that excludes female productivity are truly over. It is high time countries all over the world understand this fact and make appropriate changes to the accounting systems used for calculating national incomes. More work of scholarship is needed in this direction to improve the discipline of feminist economics.
