Ruth Leger Sivard (1915–2015)

Ruth Leger Sivard was born in Queens, New York, to George Leger and his wife Susan Zieten Leger, a German immigrant. She attended Flushing High School and Smith College, from which she graduated in 1937. She earned a master's degree in economics at New York University.
She married Robert Sivard, art director of the United States Information Agency, with whom she had two children. Following World War II, she went to Europe to work with the United Nations in Austria and the International Refugee Organization in Switzerland. She worked with several U.S. federal agencies before joining the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) in 1961. She became the leader of ACDA's economic department three years later and began comparing military spending to other budgets and social indicators such as infant mortality in annual reports. She also prepared reports on women, including their role in the economy and government. In 1971, she left ACDA and founded her own nonprofit group, World Priorities, backed by the Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller Foundation, among others. World Priorities published 16 editions of World Military and Social Expenditures from 1974 to 1996. These works continued the focus on the steady increase in defense spending compared to spending on other problems also needing attention, such as worldwide poverty, famine, illiteracy, and unemployment.