Stella Vivian Cunliffe (12 January 1917 – 20 January 2012) was a British statistician. She was the first female president of the Royal Statistical Society. Education and early career Cunliffe was educated at Parsons Mead School, Ashtead, Surrey and was Head Girl in 1934. She became the first student to go on to study at university, at the London School of Economics, where she gained a BSc (Econ) and graduated in 1938. She began her career working from 1939 to 1944 in the Danish Bacon Company. During the Second World War when bacon became rationed in 1940, she was involved in allocating bacon rations for London. Guide International Service At the end of the Second World War, Cunliffe interrupted her career to undertake voluntary relief work in Europe, from 1945 to 1947, with the Guide International Service. The service had been formed from specially trained ex-Girl Guide volunteers to help with the rehabilitation of Europe after the war. Cunliffe was among the first civilians to go into Belsen Concentration Camp in 1945, where the volunteers oversaw the so-called "human laundry", the delousing of the inmates. Statistical career In 1947 Cunliffe resumed her professional career by accepting a post as statistician at the Dublin brewers Arthur Guinness Son & Co., where she worked until 1970. In 1955 she took on the role of head of the statistics department. In this role, she developed important principles of experimental methods that are taught to this day. In the most famous example, she 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 was informed that due to a policy of only appointing men to the Board of Directors, she would not be made director despite her long career and experimental work. In 1970 she became Head of Research Unit at the Home Office, before in 1972 being appointed Director of Statistics at the Home Office, a post she held until 1977. She was the first woman to reach this grade in