Mollie Orshansky

Mollie Orshansky (born January 9, 1915, New York City, New York, U.S.—died December 18, 2006, New York City) American statistician who in the 1960s developed U.S. federal poverty thresholds that determined eligibility for many federal and state aid programs and that helped shape broader social policies.

Orshansky was one of seven daughters of Ukrainian immigrants and the first in her family to graduate from both high school and college, majoring in mathematics and statistics at Hunter College in New York. With career opportunities in universities largely closed to women, she pursued a career in government, first at the New York Department of Health and then, in 1936, at the Children’s Bureau in Washington, D.C. Over the next two decades she worked as an analyst and statistician in a variety of government agencies, accumulating the experience that would later inform her work on poverty measures.

Orshansky joined the Social Security Administration (SSA) in 1958 and first worked on the issue of poverty measures in 1960 while performing staff work for Arthur Flemming, the secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Her work on poverty continued in 1963 with an SSA research project on the effects of poverty on children, for which she developed poverty thresholds to measure the risks of income inadequacy among different groups of families. She first published her findings in July 1963.

In January 1964 U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson declared what would come to be called the War on Poverty. Meanwhile, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) adopted a simple poverty standard, classifying individuals with less than $1,500 in annual income as poor; families with less than $3,000 in annual income would also be designated poor. Upset that the CEA measure would categorize a large family with children whose income was just over $3,000 as not poor but a couple with no children and an income of just under $3,000 as poor, Orshansky set to work to expand her thresholds to all family sizes and ages, publishing both her thresholds and the analysis based on them in her best-known article, “Counting the Poor: Another Look at the Poverty Profile” (January 1965). Orshansky’s poverty thresholds were much more detailed than the CEA’s measures, taking into account family size and composition (number of children or elderly). Although the lower of her two sets of thresholds (the one eventually adopted) produced an aggregate number of poor similar to that of the CEA analysis, Orshansky’s thresholds categorized an additional four million children as poor.

The U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity adopted Orshansky’s thresholds as its working poverty measure in May 1965, and they were subsequently adopted officially throughout the federal government. Orshansky herself became more widely known as an expert, testifying before Congress and commissions on numerous occasions—a level of visibility unusual enough at the time for a woman that it was remarked on by one congressman hearing her testimony.

Orshansky’s analysis set the model for decades to come for the manner in which poverty and antipoverty policy and programs would be analyzed in the United States and elsewhere. Orshansky was cited and recognized in poverty research and measurement in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, as well as by many international organizations.