For Waring, the most essential elements of life cannot be reduced to a budget line. "I don't want to see the things I love," she says, "appearing in national income accounts, called valuable, along with nuclear bombs, nuclear power stations, toxic wastes, female sexual slavery, trade in drugs and everything else. This is the invitation that is being extended to us, and we have to stop it, right now."

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Waring's work is the subject of a 1995 film, Who's Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics, directed by Terre Nash and produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

Waring left her goat farm in 2002 and moved back to the city, where she has continued to explore and publish her economic ideas, while teaching at various universities. She is a respected academic who has won fellowships from Harvard University and Rutgers University, worked as Senior Lecturer at the University of Waikato, and headed the Public Policy program at Auckland's Massey University. In 2006, she will begin working at the Institute of Public Policy at the Auckland University of Technology.

Waring has written many articles and books, including Three Masquerades: Essays on Equality, Work, and Hu(Man) Rights (1996) and In the Lifetime of a Goat: Writings 1984-2000 (2002).

She is a member of the Board of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and has served as a consultant for such organizations as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the United Nations Development Fund for Women and for a number of countries in South East Asia and the Pacific.

Waring also works for gay and lesbian rights. While fighting to legalize same-sex marriage in New Zealand, she has become an outspoken critic of civil unions, calling them discriminatory and a form of "separate but equal" oppression.

Vermont's Civil Union law conferred all the rights, benefits, and responsibilities of marriage on same-sex couples.

In the United States, glbtq candidates have achieved some significant successes at the ballot box in the last three decades, running for and winning local, state, and national elections.

Recently, New Zealand has distinguished itself for its liberal attitudes towards those of diverse genders and sexualities and its progressive anti-discrimination policies.

Lesbian and gay couples have been fighting for the freedom to marry since the dawn of the modern glbtq struggle for equality; despite some success abroad, progress toward same-sex marriage in the United States has been slow.

Women's studies, an interdisciplinary academic field that was inaugurated at major universities around 1970, is now offered at every conceivable type of academic institution throughout the world.

The thought of John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century, was influenced by his experience as a homosexual.