Mollie Orshansky was an American statistician and economist who developed the Orshansky Poverty Thresholds in the mid 1960s. These thresholds are still used today in the United States as a measure of the income that a household must not exceed to be counted as poor. In 1976, Orshansky received the Distinguished Service Award for her leadership in creating the first nationally accepted measure of income adequacy and applying it to public policy.
