Gerald Gardner

Gerald Henry Frazier Gardner (March 2, 1926 – July 25, 2009) was an Irish-American mathematician, geophysicist and social activist whose statistical analysis led to the banning of classified advertising segregated by gender in a 1973 ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States in the case Pittsburgh Press Co. v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations. On a professional basis, he did early work on the use of monitoring seismological vibrations to identify deposits of natural gas that became industry standards.

Early life and education Gardner was born on March 2, 1926, in Tullamore, Ireland, and attended Trinity College in Dublin, where he majored in physics and mathematics, graduating in 1948. He moved to the United States, earning a masters in 1949 in applied mathematics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later known as Carnegie Mellon University) in 1949 and a Ph.D. at Princeton University in mathematical physics in 1953. From 1950 to 1955, he was an honorary scholar at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, where he served as a technical liaison to China.

The local commission upheld the complaint, which included statistical evidence gathered by Gardner that showed the unlikelihood of a woman obtaining a job designated for men and described pay differentials between positions designated by gender that "flabbergasted" him. Former NOW president Eleanor Smeal described how Gardner's evidence was "hard intellectual theory based on the math" that "made it understandable, powerfully so."

He was involved in another lawsuit in 1975, in which the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police was sued by the NAACP and NOW, which claimed that the department had discriminated in hiring women, African Americans and other minorities by the department.

Gardner died on July 25, 2009, aged 83, at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, from leukemia. He was survived by his wife Jo Ann Evans, who adopted the surname "Evansgardner", a merged version of their last names, after their marriage in 1950.