Marilyn Waring challenged what economies count.

Cooking a meal. Cleaning a home. Looking after someone who needs help. These activities take time, whether or not money changes hands.

In 1988, Marilyn Waring published If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics. She challenged national accounting rules that left much unpaid household work outside their measures of production. Her subject was not simply what women earned, but what the accounts recognised as valuable.

In a 2020 essay about lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand, she described the distinction through domestic work: paying someone to cook or clean counted in the accounts, while doing those same tasks unpaid within the household did not. The work continued. Its treatment in the accounts changed.

Her argument also resists a simple solution. In her 2019 essay on unpaid work, Waring questioned whether assigning a monetary value was the most useful approach. Estimates could reproduce existing pay inequalities. Time-use data could instead reveal overlapping tasks, workloads and the uneven availability of rest.

She also cautioned against reducing unpaid work to care alone. It includes community work, household maintenance and other activities that keep daily life going.