Summarize this:

The year 1975 witnessed New Zealand welcome its 14th woman to parliament. A then 23-year-old Marilyn Waring found herself in a house of conservative white men, and instead of staying quiet out of gratitude for having a seat at the table, she spoke louder and more articulately than anybody ever had and perhaps has since.

Marilyn pioneered feminist economics – a field that provides a well-needed gender lens to what some like to call “astrology for men”. Economics is a beautiful discipline with all its logic and charts. It is a school where everything seems to balance; supply meets demand and we have equilibrium. The field of economics has considered itself in such a state of equilibrium for so long that its theories have become core tenets of not just the discipline, but in turn all nation states. We put as much faith in economics as we do in the laws of gravity, the importance of procreation for the continuation of human existence, or the notion that causing harm to others is inherently bad.

Economics is not, however, a science. Nor is it a philosophy or theology. It is politics with mathematics involved. Just as politics can be critiqued, influenced, and ultimately changed, so too can our understanding of economic theories. One does not need to be Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes to challenge these core tenets; one can be an aspiring classical pianist who asks too many damn questions, i.e. Marilyn.

Marilyn cut to the chase early on in her political career and questioned the measurement of gross domestic product (GDP), which by her first term was well and truly established as the key metric for assessing a country’s growth and progress. GDP measures all which passes through the market economy, so any good or service with a price tag that witnesses money changing hands. Marilyn’s GDP critique was ultimately two-fold:

Firstly, GDP does not account for unpaid labour; a form of undervalued work that provides the foundations propping up the price-driven market economy. Marilyn drew back the curtain on worlds lost behind white linen on the washing line and showed the value these hidden people produce for our communities. She worked tirelessly to make the invisible women; the housewives; the mothers; the unskilled and subsistence labourers seen and counted.

Secondly, GDP cannot decrease from transactions or events. As Marilyn puts it, GDP accounting has no debit side. Everything that passes through the market economy is counted as beneficial for growth. In a Canadian documentary made about Marilyn and her work, she used a great tale of an oil spillage and how the subsequent clean up, reparations to locals, donations to environmental groups, and so on, all involved an exchange of funds that collectively categorised the oil spillage as a complete success.

Another example of this that Marilyn has often highlighted in her work is that war drives GDP. Notably, GDP was initially developed to assist in determining war financing. In fact, it was British economist Mr Keynes himself who wrote the paper “How to pay for the war” in 1940.

By all accounts, war is amazing for GDP and the market economy. There are the investments in the latest warfare, the mobilisation and transportation of troops, the drain on the energy markets, the inevitable clean up and reparations… I mean you even have the unpaid and invisible people back home finally contributing by stepping up into the workforce. It is for these very reasons that an argument can be made that governments are incentivised, whether they are conscious of it or not, to engage in war and conflict. But how can anybody make the argument that war’s debits do not outweigh its credits, or even that war has no debits to begin with?

Upon reflecting on the various monetary exchanges that would have occurred to achieve some of the twentieth century’s most devastating wars, I began to think of another war a lot closer to home. I asked myself, if those wars were so beneficial for GDP, then what does the war on women do for supposed growth?

To begin we should define what is meant by the war on women. Its scope could be so wide and parameters bursting, and that is exactly how I intend to define it. The war on women is the million-year war, originating from the conception of patriarchal societies and spreading like syphilis across the globe.

It begins and ends with simultaneously: 1) instilling fear in all women that threats of violence against their physical and emotional selves are always somewhat imminent, and 2) convincing men that they are entitled to be in control even if this means using violence.

This fear in women and entitlement in men drives countless industries and revenue line items. Think of all the women who have sought crisis and therapeutic services in response to harm, the investments in hormonal contraceptives like they are a luxury item, or all the teenage girls buying razors at the mere sight of body hair because they have been told many times that boys get upset about that stuff, and they do not want to be unlovable, or worse still, make a boy upset.

Think of the products that are moved off shelves in droves, because their advertisements, covertly or otherwise, allude to women’s subordination, and men as a result must have them. Think of the public spending on police forces, ambulances, courts and prisons, all in the name of safety. Think of the media industry and how it seems to win big each time another woman is found dead. Then think of the infrastructure attempting to curb this violence by putting in CCTV cameras and fluorescent lights, whilst most of the harm women experience is under dull bedside lamps in the comfort of their own homes.

How many metaphorical band-aids have men and women bought to help heal the mental wounds of toxic masculinity and gender inequality? Could the act of Netflix binging to dull debilitating depression count as a metaphorical band-aid if the depression originates from feeling unable to be a real man? How many extra drinks have you purchased at the bar to reduce anxiety about how you look in your dress or if the drunk man is leering at you?

Please, do not get me started on the cost of childcare.

The war on women almost has no bounds; it permeates everything we know and hold true in society, just like the market economy. Instead of investigating the costs associated with the total subordination of women and how to use that knowledge to achieve gender equality, let us ponder a moment on the revenue generated by the war on women and what that can teach us. For perhaps then we can begin to unravel why we cannot seem to untie women’s oppression. 

Please note: opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer