Bryant, who served until President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, came into office in 1993, was credited with modernizing the department and its approach. But the undercount issue persists.īeyond the controversy, Dr. The question ultimately landed in front of the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1996 that the decision not to adjust the numbers had been within the secretary’s discretion. “That denial would be a greater inaccuracy than any inaccuracies that adjustment may introduce.” “In my opinion, not adjusting would be denying that these five million persons exist,” she said. Bryant, though, saw the issue differently. Mosbacher, the commerce secretary, for rejecting the adjustment was that it might introduce its own inaccuracies into the data. Bryant exercised in supporting the recommendation of the technical staff is memorable.”Īmong the reasons given by Mr. “The merits of adjustment remain a complicated technical matter, but the courage that Dr. Bryant and was later director of the Census Bureau himself, said by email. Groves, provost of Georgetown University, who worked under Dr. “The technical staff of the bureau, after months of analysis, supported adjustment, while the Commerce Department leadership ultimately decided to reject such adjustment,” Robert M. Bryant was serving in a Republican administration. It was a question with political ramifications, since census numbers are used to apportion congressional seats, allocate federal aid and more.Īdjusting to correct the undercount, which was estimated at five million people, would benefit urban, generally Democratic areas Dr. There was considerable debate about whether statistical models could be used to adjust the numbers produced by the traditional census to account for the invisible populations. Her bigger battle, though, was over how to account for those millions of people who, no matter what extra efforts were made, would not be counted. “Eighty or 90 percent of our effort is targeted at the 10 percent we’re most likely to miss.” “It’s upside-down marketing,” she told The New York Times in the spring of 1990, describing efforts the bureau was making to overcome the biases. She knew that many people, whether because they were apathetic, they distrusted government or they were simply hard to reach, would not be easily counted, and that minority groups and the homeless were among those who were disproportionately overlooked. Bryant became the public face of the 1990 census, appearing on television and in newspaper interviews to urge people to participate. “She handled the implementation of the census and the undercount controversies with aplomb.”ĭr. Anderson, a census scholar whose books include “The American Census: A Social History” (1988), said by email. “She knew she was walking into a tough job, including decisions on census processes made before her tenure that she nevertheless had to live with,” Margo J. There were other problems that she inherited as well, including a certain backwardness in adapting to the computer age and a failure to adjust census taking to demographic changes like the proliferation of nontraditional households. The undercount issue would ultimately put her at odds with her boss, the secretary of commerce, Robert A. “The tendency, partly orchestrated because of the lawsuit, I think, was for everybody to come in and be a critic.” Bryant said in an oral history recorded for the bureau in 1993. “There are so many parts of the operation and also such enormous media and congressional scrutiny that you felt as though you were constantly fighting off the critics,” Dr. In 1988, New York City joined with other municipalities and some states in a lawsuit seeking to require the bureau to do something about the chronic undercounting problem that left many minority groups, the homeless and others underrepresented in census figures. It was also already drawing criticism and challenges. The process of taking the national census once a decade begins years in advance and was already well underway. Bush in December 1989 she came to the job from Market Opinion Research, a Detroit company specializing in polling data, where she had been senior vice president. Bryant was appointed by President George H.W. Her daughter Linda Bryant Valentine confirmed the death, at a senior living centerĭr. Barbara Everitt Bryant, the first woman to lead the United States Census Bureau, who dived into roiling waters when she took the job in late 1989 as the agency was beginning the contentious decennial census of 1990, died on March 3 in Ann Arbor, Mich.
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