Feminist’s Ideas Resonating Across the World

Feminist professor Marilyn Waring, 61, has never been afraid to go her own way. She was among the few politicians included on the Weekend Herald’s much-debated Easter feature on New Zealand’s 50 coolest people – both for the way she stood up to Rob Muldoon over nuclear ship visits as a National MP from 1975 to 1984, then later to the male-dominated economics profession.

Now a new book published in her honour in Canada, Counting on Marilyn Waring, says she “regularly ranks on exclusive lists of people who have made a real change to the world”. The book’s 31 authors from nine countries record many uses of her work that Waring herself did not know about.

From an academic base first at Massey University’s Albany campus and now as professor of public policy at AUT, Waring has spent the past 25 years working for the UN and other agencies to empower women and men to challenge the priorities that mainstream economists imposed on them.

She has recently finished a 13-part curriculum on gender and economics for the UN Development Programme’s Asian and Pacific managers.

Waring has developed a human rights approach that puts women and other vulnerable people at the centre, asking, “What would make women’s lives easier, safer and freer, and what would make women more valued, productive, have more life opportunities, have more power?”

Original article by Simon Collins, The New Zealand Herald, May 3, 2014.