Miss Mollie Orshansky attended Hunter College
from 1931 to 1935. She attained an A.B. degree, with major study
in mathematics and statistics. She continued graduate studies
in economics and statistics at the Department of Agriculture
Graduate School and American University.
Her Federal career began in 1939 as a Research Clerk with the
U.S. Children's Bureau, working on biometric studies of child
health, growth, and nutrition. In January 1942, as a Statistician
in the New York City Department of Health, she worked on a survey
of the incidence of and therapies for pneumonia. In 1945, Miss
Orshansky moved to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where
she spent the next thirteen years as: a Family Economist, conducting
research on family consumption and levels of living; Director
of the Program Statistics Division, planning and directing the
statistical program; and a Food Economist responsible for the
collecting and analyzing data on food consumption and expenditures
by households in the United States.
In 1958, Miss Orshansky joined the Social Security Administration
as a Social Science Research Analyst in the Office of Research
and Statistics where she became responsible for analytical studies
to measure income adequacy, family welfare and patterns of family
income. In 1963 she developed the official measure of poverty
used by the U.S. government. The basis of her idea was to use
the cost of a nutritionally adequate diet as the basis for a
cost-of-living estimate and to calculate a cost of living for
families of different sizes and composition. In 1976 Miss Orshansky
received the Distinguished Service Award in recognition for
her leadership in creating the first nationally accepted measures
of income adequacy and applying them to public policy.
The contributions made by Miss Orshansky to the statistical
measurement of the low income population, and its causal effects
of Federal programs on that population have earned her the affectionate
moniker, "Miss Poverty."
Mollie Orshansky retired from the Social Security Administration
in 1982, after more than 40 years of government service. |
www.socialsecurity.gov
