2DkcTXceO

204 Women in statistics in Canadamealtime conversations at any dinner party I have ever attended rarelyturn to the topic of statistics, I was surprised by the turn of events.For some reason that I cannot recall one of the sisters, a diminutiveand exuberant nonagenarian, stated that she was a statistician. Afterasking where she had worked and when, and where, when and withwhom she had studied, I came to the conclusion that I was talking notonly to the oldest surviving statistician in the province of Manitoba,but also to one of the first women, if not the first, to work professionallyas a statistician in Canada.” (Bellhouse, 2002)The statistician was Isobel Loutit, who was born in Selkirk, Manitoba, inJuly of 1909. She obtained a BA in mathematics with a minor in French fromthe University of Manitoba in 1929. She was taught statistics by ProfessorLloyd Warren, using textbooks by Gavett and Yule. She started out as ateacher — in those days, school teaching, nursing and secretarial work werevirtually the only career paths open to women on graduation — but with theWorld War II, as positions for women in industry opened up, she began acareer in statistical quality control. In 1969, at a time where it was still rarefor women to hold leadership positions, Loutit became chair of the MontréalSection of the American Society for Quality Control (ASQC).She was made an Honorary Member of the Statistical Society of Canada in2009, and the Business and Industrial Statistics Section instituted the IsobelLoutit Invited Address in her honor. She died in April 2009 at the age of 99.19.2 Early historical contextAlthough the first census in North America was conducted in New France byIntendant Jean Talon in 1665–66, data gathering in Canada more generallyseems to have become serious business only in the 19th century. Canadiansof the time were avidly interested in science. Zeller (1996) credits Alexandervon Humboldt’s encouragement of worldwide studies of natural phenomenaand the culture of the Scottish Enlightenment with leading to the Victorian“tradition of collecting ‘statistics’... using detailed surveys to assess resourcesand quality of life in various districts.” In Canada, such surveys for agriculturalpotential began as early as 1801 in Nova Scotia. Natural history societieswere founded in the 1820s and later, while scientific organizations began to beformed in the 1840s. Statistics was used in analyses related to public health inMontréal as early as the 1860s (Bellhouse and Genest, 2003), a few years afterthe pioneering work of Florence Nightingale and John Snow in the 1850s.In both Britain and North America there were substantial increases in opportunityfor education of women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,and women began to enter the scientific professions. At the same time, statisticsas a mathematical discipline came into being, through the efforts of Karl