Stella Cunliffe

Stella Vivian Cunliffe MBE (12 January 1917 – 20 January 2012) was a British statistician. She was the first female president of the Royal Statistical Society.

She was educated at Parsons Mead, Ashtead and the London School of Economics where she gained a BSc (Econ).

She started her career in the Danish Bacon Company (1939–44) but at the end of World War II interrupted her career to do voluntary relief work in Europe with the Guide International service (1945–47).

In 1947 she resumed her career by accepting a post as statistician at the Dublin brewers Arthur Guinness Son & Co. (1947–70). In this role, Cunliffe developed important principles of experimental methods that are taught to this day. In the most famous example, Cunliffe redesigned the instructions for quality control workers who were tasked to either accept or reject handmade beer barrels. Before Cunliffe's redesign, workers accepted barrels by rolling them downhill and rejected barrels by pushing them uphill, the more difficult task; thus, workers were biased to accept barrels even if they were flawed. Cunliffe redesigned the quality control work station so that it was equally easy to reject or accept a barrel, eliminating the prior bias and saving Guinness money in the process.

She then in 1970 became Head of Research Unit at the Home Office (1970–72) before being appointed Director of Statistics at the Home Office (1972–77), the first woman to reach this grade in the British Government Statistical Service. During her time at the Home Office she expanded the department's statistical and support staff, and established a dedicated computing team. She was a prison visitor, and promoted the use of statistics in criminal justice policy. She presented the Home Secretary Roy Jenkins with international comparisons to show that capital punishment had no effect on murder rates.

She was later Statistical Adviser to the Committee of Enquiry into the Engineering Profession 1978-80.

She served as the first female President of the Royal Statistical Society from 1975 to 1977.

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