Counting on Marilyn Waring: New Advances in Feminist Economics

COUNTING ON MARILYN WARING: NEW ADVANCES IN FEMINIST ECONOMICS Edited by Margunn Bjornholt and Ailsa McKay Toronto, Canada: Demeter Press, 2014 ISBN 978 1 927335 2 7 7The treatment of breastfeeding in Counting on Marilyn WaringIn 1988, New Zealand feminist and ex Member of Parliament, Marilyn Waring, published a groundbreaking book called Counting for Nothing (published in other countries as If Women Counted). This identified the exclusion of women's unpaid work from national accounting systems, notably the Gross Domestic Product measure (GDP). Waring's central claim was that women's unpaid work - including reproductive and care work - needed to be valued and 'counted'. Significantly, Waring identified breastfeeding and the production of human milk as an important component of women's unpaid and unrecognised 'work' and one that needed to be counted. At the time of her writing this was a relatively radical concept, at least in the English language literature.In 2014, as a tribute to Waring's pioneering work in developing and popularising a feminist framework for thinking about economics, Demeter Press has published an edited collection entitled Counting on Marilyn Waring: New Advances in Feminist Economics, which contains 17 essays on feminist economics that build on and advance Waring's work. While Waring's analysis of the lack of value attached to women's unpaid work is wide ranging, the specific focus of our review is on Waring's contribution to identifying breastfeeding as an important component of women's unpaid 'work' and how this has been addressed in this 2014 tribute compilation.According to Waring (1988), human milk is a valuable commodity, and the value of time involved in its production should be counted as part of GDP. Waring argued that the failure to value breastfeeding exemplifies the invisibility of women's work and is part of a worldwide pattern of undervaluing women's economic contribution.An important figure in furthering this understanding of breastfeeding as a form of unrecognised 'work' - and one that is time costly - is fellow Antipodean Dr Julie Smith, an economist at the Australian Centre for Economic Research on Health (Australian National University) and one of the contributors to this collection on Waring's work.In her chapter entitled Making Mothers' Milk Count Smith argues that although Counting for Nothing 'was not the first call to acknowledge the economic value of mother's milk and breastfeeding, ... it was the first to demand its proper valuation and to insist that the costs of breastfeeding to women be accounted for.' (p. 214). According to Smith, prior to the 1990s there existed 1) a 'mothers' milk equals cows' milk' approach to valuing breastfeeding and 2) the view that mothers' time involved in breastfeeding is free/without cost (p. 215). Since the 1990s, thanks largely to Waring's 1988 critique, there has been a challenge to these misconceptions. Smith also describes how in the Australian context Waring's work has inspired and supported breastfeeding advocacy as well as influencing policy. Yet, despite several high level reports and extensive advocacy, the value of human milk production has still not been included in Australia's economic statistics. This also holds true for New Zealand.Smith contends that 'excluding human milk production from GDP means that Australia's policymakers focus on promoting the activities of commercial firms producing less than $200 million of infant food products per year, whilst giving no importance to protecting household production of human milk worth $2 billion a year or more. It is difficult to see why disrupting the system by comparing these values is undesirable, or why it overburdens policy analysis to show the large magnitude of non market production of infant food' (p. 222).This oversight is also relevant at the international level. As Smith points out, two of the world's leading economists, Nobel prize-winners Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen (along with Jean-Paul Fitoussi) in a 2009 review of GDP measurement cited human milk production as an example of how a focus on GDP-biased policymaking failed to account for women's unpaid work of breastfeeding and the economic value of this unique food for infants and young children. …

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