Marilyn Waring didn’t expect we’d still be talking about her book 30 years on. In 1988 bookstores around the world were stocking a 280-page essay on how women’s unpaid contributions are excluded from GDP. Counting For Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth was the title. This book remains one of the most incisive critiques of how the economy is measured.

Counting for Nothing draws from a decade of political battles, and weeks spent alone in a forgotten library at the United Nations in New York. Marilyn Waring, a former politician from New Zealand, makes the case that women are systematically excluded from measurements of value. Her arguments are backed up by extensive research but can also be understood by a broad audience. The book is angry. It’s also humourous.

The famous feminist Gloria Steinem added the preface, writing that the book was like finally seeing the world with both eyes. Economist John Kenneth Gailbraith called it “splendid work.” Counting for Nothing is now cited throughout the world as countries change how they calculate Gross Domestic Product.

Gross Domestic Product, GDP, is the best-known way to gauge the size of the economy. It’s the value of everything produced each year. It’s how rich a country is. And richer countries tend to be, on average, happier, safer and healthier.

Gross Domestic Product, as we know it, traces back to work on national production by Cambridge economist, Colin Clark, in 1932. This was adapted to the American economy by Simon Kuznets in 1934. But even Kuznets warned that GDP was narrowly defined.

And many others have pointed out that that this way of counting up the value of everything bought in the supermarket, every couch and chair ordered from a furniture shop, every bottle of milk drunk, anything that can be paid for with dollars doesn’t measure many things that we value but are done for free. Take, caring. Looking after Grandma at home does not add to GDP; send her to a rest home, and GDP rises. GDP doesn’t measure the value of clean air. And it counts some things most of us would consider to be bad. An earthquake can raise GDP because the clean-up costs are added.

These arguments have all been made many times before. And so have the arguments that housework is undervalued.

The same year that Simon Kuznets put together American national accounts, in 1934, a pioneering economist called Margaret Reid published a book called The Economics of Household Production.

But it was Marilyn’s work that pointed a challenge directly to the UN, and every bureaucracy around the world that used their system. And her book inspired a new generation to add a potent dose of unadulterated feminism to economics.

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The American Economic Association holds its 1990 conference in Washington D.C. It’s the biggest event of the year.

Inside from the cold December day, there are over 100 people, filling the room. People listen from the halls. A panel of women economists talk. The discussion is titled, “Can feminism find a home in economics?”

Why now? It’s way past the feminist protests in the 1970s. 15 years after International Women’s Year in 1975. Why are the economists just now talking about feminism?

One tributary to this overflowing meeting was a powerful book published two years earlier, in 1988, Counting for Nothing, which points out, with spirited humour, that economics is fundamentally biased against valuing the contributions of women.

Writing Counting for Nothing, the founding text for feminist economics, is just one achievement of Marilyn Waring. It’s one of her many big moves. Marilyn is the youngest person to ever be elected to New Zealand’s Parliament. In 1984, she takes a stand against nuclear-powered American ships, which is the straw that topples the New Zealand Government. This is her story.

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Marilyn grows up in a small town called Taupiri. She told magazine The Monthly that the town “survived on voluntary work. If you had to paint lines on the tennis court or on the athletic track, nobody was being paid for it … people volunteered.”

After completing her studies in political science and international politics, she thinks about putting feminist theory into practice. It’s 1975—international women’s year.

She wants to be a candidate for the conservative National Party. That’s an unusual choice for a young, gay feminist. She later told Radio New Zealand that this was because of the Labour Party leader Norman Kirk’s homophobia.

“Norman Kirk stood up and said it was evil and unnatural and he’d have nothing to do with it. And so I got up from the library, reading that in the paper, and walked down to Lambton Quay and joined the National Party.”

She signs up for the Raglan electorate, which is a mostly rural district.

It really is quite an odd fit. But the National Party has one key advantage for Marilyn: she would be free to “cross the floor.” Crossing the floor means voting on a topic against your party. The ability to vote as she wants means a lot to Marilyn. In fact, it will come to define her.

In her quest for selection in Raglan, she’s up against 9 local men, and one woman to face the party.

So she swots up on Raglan’s issues. At the Parliamentary library she reads through local newspapers.

Marilyn visits each of the women on the final selection committee. At a visit to one of these women, Katherine O’Regan, Marilyn notices that Katherine’s toddler is crying while her mother is trying to cook scones and chat, and make tea for the men out in the farm.

Katherine recalled this in an interview for the documentary Who’s Counting?: