During her years as a member of parliament in New Zealand, Marilyn Waring was famous for asking embarrassing questions. 'Dumb Questions', she calls them. What did they mean by GDP (Gross Domestic Product, a variation of the indicator generally used in the U.S. of Gross National Product, GNP). If it was based on national accounts, could she see a complete set? They were not available, she was told. Only 10 MPs had ever asked to see them.

When she chaired the Public Expenditure Select Committee she discovered more about a nation’s books than most politicians know. Computing a figure for the hidden, or underground, economy is 'one of the biggest jokes of all,' says Waring. 'You pop it in at 3 percent or twenty, depending on what the government needs to have in front of it at any particular time'. A sizeable part could represent criminal activity, the untaxed proceeds of drugs or prostitution.

While the estimates of the hidden economy are calmly accepted, whole areas of productive activity are consciously excluded from national accounts and hence from calculations of GDP. Plowing through tomes of rules governing the compilation of national accounts in the United Nations library to prepare her new book –  If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (Harper & Row $19.95)* – she found they disregarded entirely the production of subsistence farming, which is the bulk of farming around the world and almost exclusively the work of women, and left out the productive but unpaid activity of households, including volumes of voluntary community work, most of that done by women. Waring said she wept for a week when she came across the rationale for the exclusion in the 1953 revision of the UN System of National Accounts. It said these computations were not made 'since primary production and the consumption of their own produce by nonprimary producers is of little or no importance'. In her book Waring describes this little sentence as embodying 'every aspect of the blindness of patriarchy, its arrogance, its lack of perception – and it enshrines the invisibility and enslavement of women in the economic process as ‘of little or no importance’'.

In an interview, Marilyn Waring explained the importance of such omissions: 'If you’re invisible in the national accounts you’re absent when public policy is made'. In other words, the figures are rigged. 'You can have large numbers of people at the level of absolute poverty and increase the GDP,' she said. 'Not only are the figures inaccurate; they are worse than nothing. The trouble is politicians are lost when  they can’t talk about budget deficits as a percentage of GDP.'

To the refusal to recognise statistically the work of half the world’s population, she adds another accusation: blindness to the ecological cost of much “productive” economic activity. The price in polluted water, destroyed rain forest, degraded and radiated soil should be on the deficit side of GDP and appropriate deductions made. Why, for example, does a tree have measurable value when it is chopped down and sold, but not while it is growing and giving us oxygen?

These boundaries of production are formulated largely as a matter of convenience, but also, she argues, from ideological sexist bias. Purchasing domestic services for a household is productive; doing them yourself is not. 'It’s so ironic – no it’s not, it’s sick,' she said. If a man marries his housekeeper the GDP goes down. 'If Adam Smith was fed daily by Mrs. Smith, he omitted to notice or to mention it. He did not, of course, pay her. What her interest was in feeding him we can only guess, for Adam Smith saw no "value" in what she did.'

The activities of a pimp or heroin pusher add to the circulation of money and are given a statistical value. Yet a young girl in Zimbabwe who works from sunrise to sunset fetching water and firewood, cleaning, cooking, and caring for siblings is unproductive, unoccupied, and economically inactive. Her work is not counted as work at all. And recorded 'growth' may well be negative in terms of people’s welfare. Nutritional difficulties often occur when subsistence farmland is taken for cash crops and men get paid an income, which then is counted in the GDP. And Thailand is among the Asian countries enjoying 'growth', but what part of that comes from the hidden economy activity of the sexual slavery of women in Bangkok and the increase in the international drug trade?

Marilyn Waring’s short-term goal is not to put a monetary value on everything, giving the priceless a price or measuring the immeasurable. She wants econometric modelers, statisticians, bureaucrats, and politicians to accept the conceptual challenge of allowing two 'complementary portrayals of the same reality' to inform their decisions. 'If by imputation we could measure all the productive work of women it would transform decision-making, policy-making, and state investment, all of which are based on the national accounts.'

In the longer term she is a radical, a revolutionary who wants the whole system of national accounting overthrown and with it the environmentally destructive, patriarchally blinkered, armaments-oriented values system it has encouraged. Some small reforms have been made: the census questionnaires on which much of the national accounts data is based now often direct their questions not to the head of the household – generally seen as the man of the house – but to a 'reference person'. That’s not enough for Marilyn Waring. When the next round of censuses is conducted in 1990–91, she wants women to define themselves not as housewife – 'the word is an albatross round our necks in this death wish system' – and invisible, but by the work they actually do. She hopes it will throw the statisticians.

*Counting for Nothing: What Men Value & What Women Are Worth was published internationally as If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics.