Ethel Mary Elderton (1878–1954) was a Britishbiometrician,statistician andeugenics researcher who worked withFrancis Galton andKarl Pearson.

Elderton was born on 31 December 1878 in Fulham, London. Her father,William Alexander Elderton was a private tutor and her mother,Sarah Isabella, née Lapidge was school headmistress. The couple had eight children, of which Elderton was the third and the eldest girl. Her eldest brother wasWilliam Palin Elderton, a statistician who worked as an actuary and became head ofEquitable Life Assurance Society and also a friend of biostatisticianKarl Pearson.^[1] Another brother,Thomas Howard Elderton was the president ofthe Calcutta Trust.^[2] Her father and a younger brother were Cambridge wranglers. Her exceptional mathematical abilities, stemming from family tradition, laid the foundation for her career.^[3]

Elderton was educated atStreatham High School before studying atBedford College in London. There she was taught byAlice Lee, who was also employed by Pearson,^[1] and became involved in the eugenics movement. She left without completing her studies in 1890, on the death of her father, and became a school teacher.^[4] In 1903 she was appointed as Galton's part-time secretary. Then, recommended byAlice Lee, she became a full-time member of his Eugenics Record Office from 1905 to 1907. She was an official member (a Francis Galton Scholar) of theGalton Eugenics Laboratory and transferred to Pearson's direction from 1907 to 1911.^[5][6][2] Subsequently she became the teaching fellow in University College London in 1911 and the assistant professor atGalton Eugenics Laboratory (renamed the Department of Human Genetics and Biometry in 1966) in 1925.^[7][6] As a full-time member, Elderton's salary was 100 pounds per year in 1906.^[6][2] She gave up the offer with higher salary of the post of Secretary to a London College because she much preferred research work to executive work.^[8]

Elderton, who moved into it at the beginning of 1917 along with the rest of Pearson's team, was employed onAnti-Aircraft Experimental Section (AAES) work. Her enthusiasm and capacity for hard work remained undimmed, and in the summer of 1917 Pearson singled her out, together withAdelaide Davin (another woman employed by Pearson), for additional pay for working extended hours and for giving up their customary 12-weeks holiday. She got on very well with Pearson, being the only member of his team to remain with him after the transfer of the AAES work to theMinistry of Munitions.^[3] Writing in 1930, Pearson considered her employment at UCL to be 'a most happy choice'.^[9]

Elderton provided financial backing for Pearson'sAnthropometric Laboratory, which opened in 1924.^[10]

Elderton's work was recognized by the award of theWeldon Memorial Prize by theUniversity of Oxford in 1919. This was awarded to the person who "in the ten years next preceding the date of the award, published the most noteworthy contribution to the development of mathematical or statistical methods applied to problems in Biology." In December 1931 theUniversity of London conferred on her the degree of D.Sc and in the same year, was promoted to a readership.^[3][11] She retired in 1933 and in 1939 she was living atYew Tree Cottage, Northchapel, Sussex. She died in 1954 in Stanboroughs Hydro Nursing Home, Stanborough Park, Garston, Hertfordshire.^[12]

Upon joining the Galton Laboratory, Elderton was guided and influenced by the eugenic objectives of Galton and Pearson. She held a firm belief that before seeking viable solutions to social problems, it was essential to provide solid statistical evidence.^[12] In 1907, Galton delivered the Herbert Spencer lecture, during which he outlined a proposal for a basic statistical textbook.^[13] Elderton and her brotherWilliam Palin Elderton, took up this suggestion and, leveraging their exceptional statistical skills, co-publishedPrimer of Statistics which was officially published in 1909.

JournalThe Economic Bulletin reviewed this book in 1910:Primer of Statistics is one of the most useful books upon the theory of statistics which have appeared in English, for it contains in a few pages and in terms intelligible to a person who is not competent to deal with higher mathematics, the principles which should govern the abstraction of statistical data. The arrangement of the book is extremely clear and logical.^[14][15]

Elderton delivered lectures on eugenics, which were compiled into the "Eugenics Laboratory Lecture Series" and published between 1909 and 1915. These lectures includedThe relative strength of nature and nurture (1909) and the relatively well-knownOn the Marriage of First Cousins (1911). InOn the Marriage of First Cousins, her research for this publication encompassed over 2000 cases, and both the publication and the corresponding lectures were appreciated by her laboratory colleagues and Galton himself.^[16] The work, exploring the studies of the marriage of first cousins through various academic perspectives—historical, moral, and eventually eugenics. This research gained support from other women in the laboratory, includingAmy Barrington,Kathleen T. Ryley,H. Gertrude Jones,Julia Bell, andEveline Y. Thompson.

Elderton co-authoredOn the correlation of fertility with social value: a cooperative study, published in the series "Eugenics laboratory memoirs" in 1913 withAmy Barrington,H. Gertrude Jones,Edith Mabel M. de G. Lamotte,Harold Joseph Laski, Karl Pearson. In this publication, they sought to identify the relationship between wages—equated to social value—and family size at a certain age. Based on statistical data from various cities in the UK, the work attempted to demonstrate that individuals with greater social value tend to produce fewer offspring, a trend deemed detrimental to 'a healthier leading nation.' Furthermore, it advocated for the revision of social policies, with a particular focus on charitable welfare policies.^[17]

The following Galton Laboratory publications authored or co-authored by Ethel M. Elderton are available on theUCL Modern Genetics Collection onInternet Archive. This collection has been made available for historical research purposes. The racist, ableist and classist ideas within this material do not reflect the current views of UCL.

• On the measure of the resemblance of first cousins (1907)
• The inheritance of ability: being a statistical study of the Oxford class lists and of the school lists of Harrow and Charterhouse (1907)
• A second study of the statistics of pulmonary tuberculosis: marital infection (1908)
• The relative strength of nature and nurture (1909 and 1915)
• A first study of the influence of parental alcoholism on the physique and ability of the offspring (1910)
• A second study of the influence of parental alcoholism on the physique and ability of the offspring : being a reply to certain medical critics of the first memoir and an examination of the rebutting evidence cited by them (1910)
• On the Marriage of First Cousins (1911)
• On the correlation of fertility with social value: a cooperative study (1913)
• Report on the English birthrate (1914)
• On the torsion resulting from flexure in prisms with cross-sections of uni-axial symmetry only (1918)

The work with Elderton's brother,Primer of Statistics (1909), could also be found in Internet Archive with the contribution fromCornell University.

• English statisticians
• 1878 births
• 1954 deaths
• British women statisticians
• British eugenicists
• 20th-century British women scientists
• 20th-century British women mathematicians
• 20th-century British mathematicians
• 20th-century British scientists

• CS1 errors: ISBN date
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Pages where birth or death is being automatically determined
• Articles with hCards