Nancy M. Gordon

Val Snider, ASA Publications Coordinator

The technical challenges and statistical issues we are facing are real and interesting.”

Nancy Gordon’s career has focused on providing unbiased and reliable information for decisionmaking. Early on, when she worked in academia and at nonprofit organizations and the Congressional Budget Office, her focus was policy-relevant analyses related to employment; federal tax provisions; and programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and those providing financial assistance for post-secondary education. At the U.S. Census Bureau, which she joined in 1995, data collection and dissemination have been her primary responsibilities. 

The Early Years

Until July 2005, Gordon was the associate director for demographic programs, providing executive leadership for all the bureau’s household surveys. With an annual budget of $300 million and more than 800 employees, she led the production of data that today drives the allocation of more than $400 billion in federal funds each year.

She also led the bureau’s efforts to create the American Community Survey (ACS) and the Local Employment Dynamics (LED) Partnership. “I still meet for lunch with the four division chiefs—whose contributions were essential to achieving our successes during that period—and talk about the immensity of that work,” said Gordon. “That was not generally a decade of expanding statistical programs, so starting new ones was quite a challenge.”

To put into perspective just how challenging these undertakings were, the ACS is now an ongoing survey sent to about 3 million residential addresses annually that describes what the population looks like and how it lives. Ultimately, it helps communities determine where to locate services and allocate resources. “The ACS was initially tested with a sample from four counties,” said Gordon. “Today, it surveys the population throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico, collecting information to meet the needs of federal programs about age, race, income, commute time to work, home value, and veteran status, among other topics.”

The LED provides details about America’s jobs, workers, and local economies. It integrates existing data from state-supplied administrative records with existing information from censuses, surveys, and federal administrative records. “The prototype program began with just one state, but it has grown to include the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and all but two states,” said Gordon.

Today and the Future

In 2005, Gordon moved into her current position and shifted her focus from collecting data to finding innovative ways to disseminate them, as well as directing the development of the bureau’s strategic plan—which defines its mission, long-term goals, and objectives. “It is harder now to release information about people due to confidentiality concerns. The information on the Internet about specific, identified individuals makes the disclosure avoidance requirements of statistical agencies harder to meet,” said Gordon. At first, the Census Bureau reduced the amount of data released, but it was clear more sophisticated statistical methods had to be developed so information the country needs could be released without disclosing personal data. Gordon explained that two of these methods are to add noise and to create synthetic data. Put simply, these methods modify the data in systematic ways so individual responses are not identifiable, but the aggregated data are reliable.

These state-of-the-art methods to protect confidentiality have allowed the LED and other programs to release valid data for small geographic areas beyond traditional boundaries for public use on the Internet. For instance, the LED flagship product—Quarterly Workforce Indicators—provides information about trends in employment, hiring, job creation and destruction, and earnings with unprecedented detail concerning geography, age, gender, and industry. Another LED product, OnTheMap, is a mapping and reporting tool showing where people work and live. It is the first synthetic data product released by the Census Bureau and was presented at the United Nations this year as an example of U.S. statistical innovation.

Making a Difference

Gordon sums up her job as “providing information so people can make informed decisions.” For example, bureau data have been used extensively by many organizations to analyze the effects of federal policy options for social security and housing programs. “These decisions really matter,” said Gordon. “They affect millions of people, so we want the best possible information to be available in a timely fashion. You can’t have information if you don’t have easy access to the underlying data, which is why I enjoy being at the Census Bureau so much.”

Gordon encourages new statisticians to consider working for a federal statistical agency. “The technical challenges and statistical issues we are facing are real and interesting,” she said. “Just as long ago, when Morris Hansen was pioneering the idea of taking a survey and transformed statistics, we’re in a similar period now. The problems statistical agencies are working on are important, hard, and fun.”