First woman to lead U.S. Census Bureau oversaw 1990 count
Barbara Everitt Bryant, the first woman to run the U.S. Census Bureau and its leader during the contentious debate over how to compensate for undercounts of minority groups in the 1990 census, has died. She was 96.
Bryant’s family said in an email that she died of natural causes Thursday in Ann Arbor, Mich.
In a blogpost, Robert Santos, the current director of the Census Bureau, described Bryant, who oversaw the 1990 count of U.S. residents, as “a trailblazer and a champion of quality survey methods.”
“We mourn the loss of this groundbreaking Census Bureau leader,” Santos said.
President George H.W. Bush appointed Bryant as Census Bureau director in 1989.
During her tenure, which lasted until President Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Bryant faced concerns about undercounts of minorities. She came down on the side of a statistical method, but that was rejected by the Commerce Department.
Some statisticians, civil rights advocates and city leaders in the 1980s argued that statistical models could be used to adjust for regular undercounts of minority groups and improve the accuracy of the census, but President Ronald Reagan’s administration opposed that idea.
When Republicans retained the White House with the 1988 election of Bush, there was still uncertainty about whether the adjustment for undercounts would be used for the 1990 census. A bureau steering committee voted in favor of the adjustment, but Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher decided against ii.
“Barbara Bryant was convinced by the science supporting the recommendation and went forward with it even though it was not politically popular with the administration,” John Thompson, who was a Census Bureau director in the Obama administration, said Monday. “In my opinion, putting science over politics was a large part of her legacy.”
.Bryant received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Cornell University and a doctorate from Michigan State University. After earning her doctorate while in her mid-40s, she started a 38-year career in survey research. After leaving the Census Bureau, she joined the faculty at the University of Michigan.
She was married to John Bryant for 49 years until his death in 1997.