Visionary Leader: Marilyn Waring — a pioneer visionary

Marilyn Waring. Photo / Supplied

Many people remember Marilyn Waring as the feisty young National Member of Parliament who got under Prime Minister Rob Muldoon's skin and provoked the 1984 Snap Election.

When Labour's David Lange and Rogernomics swept into power that year, Waring turned her back on Parliament and headed into academia, earning a Doctor of Philosophy in Political Economy from Waikato University.

While Rogernomics was changing the landscape of business and trade in New Zealand, Waring created her own brand — feminist economics. She argued strongly that gender equality, sustainable development and women's human rights must be valued, cared for and included in economic modelling and performance — and soon became internationally known.

Sir Keith Holyoake with Miss Marilyn Waring, outside Parliament Buildings.

After leaving Parliament — she was MP for Raglan and then Waipa for nine years — Waring became involved with the Association for Women's Rights in Development and travelled to the Pacific Islands and Asia, encouraging local women to become more politically active and to have their voices heard.

Waring wanted women, all over, to be more economically empowered — and her crusade continues to this day.

She is an acclaimed author, development consultant and United Nations expert — and supervises 30 PhD and Master's students at the Auckland University of Technology's North Campus in Northcote as Professor of Public Policy.

Waring has held Fellowships at Harvard and Rutgers universities in the United States, Queen's University in Canada and at the Hawke Institute in Australia, and was a Visiting Professor at Southwest Jiaotong University in China.

She was a member of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Board from 2005-09. She worked as a consultant, mainly in Asia and the Pacific, for the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, United Nations Development Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, and the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa, Canada.

Visionary Leadership

Waring's work, tenacity and insights were recognised at the Deloitte Top 200 awards dinner last night when she was celebrated as the 2018 recipient of the Sheffield award for Visionary Leader.

Top 200 judge Dame Alison Paterson says the award not only recognises a person important in New Zealand's political history but also someone who has shown original, visionary thinking and application that has been inadequately recognised in New Zealand.

"Marilyn is not just a university academic, she is a leader in her field of governance and public policy, political economy, gender analysis and human rights."

Dame Alison says Waring's academic research has been influential in establishing the field of feminist economics.

"One of her most famous works, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, argued for the economic importance of women's unpaid work and the environment, revealing the serious policy consequences caused by ignoring these when calculating national economic m