How can economics aid our understanding of how gender works in society and of the relationship between market and non-market activity? This paper cites the example of Professor Marilyn Waring and her path-breaking book If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (1988). The origins of that book, and the research it required, illustrate how gendered innovation in the social sciences may not fit the Popper-Kuhn-Lakatos model of paradigm change, but can emerge from the breaking of new ground by a researcher embedded within a community of activists grappling with major issues of social inequality. This has implications for future economics research agendas focused on the wellbeing of people (rather than on gross domestic product), which cannot be gender blind to be effective.

Paul Dalziel is Professor of Economics and Deputy Director of the Agribusiness and Economics Research Unit (AERU) at Lincoln University, New Zealand. He is the co-author with Professor Caroline Saunders of Wellbeing Economics: Future Directions for New Zealand, published by Bridget Williams Books in 2014. This address is based on a recent article by Saunders and Dalziel in Feminist Economics entitled ‘25 Years of Counting for Nothing: Waring’s Critique of National Accounts’.