Barbara Bryant, First Woman to Lead the Census Bureau, Dies at 96

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. But the undercount issue persists.

Beyond the controversy, Dr. Bryant, who served until President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, came into office in 1993, was credited with modernizing the department and its approach.

“She brought her long experience in survey research to bear to press for new thinking about how to take the census,” Professor Anderson, professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said, “ideas that would bear fruit in the practice of later censuses.”

Barbara Alice Everitt was born on April 5, 1926, in Ann Arbor. Her mother, Dorothy (Wallace) Everitt, was a homemaker, and her father, William, was a professor of engineering at the Ohio State University and later dean at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at Cornell University in 1947, thinking of a career as a science writer, but when she married John Harold Bryant in 1948, she put her plans on hold to raise their three children. With the family living in Birmingham, Mich., she resumed her education, earning a master’s degree in journalism at Michigan State University in 1967 and a Ph.D. in communication there in 1970.

By the time she earned her doctorate she was already doing work for Market Opinion Research, and she began working there full time. The company’s president, Robert Teeter, left in 1987 to work on Mr. Bush’s successful presidential campaign, and, Dr. Bryant said in the oral history, “it’s rather clear to me who suggested to the transition team that I be the director of the Census Bureau.”

After leaving the bureau, she joined the faculty of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, where she was instrumental in developing the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which measures how satisfied consumers are with products and services in a variety of industries. She retired as a research scientist emerita in 2008.