Shirley Pledger is a New Zealand mathematician and statistician known for her work on mark and recapture methods for estimating wildlife populations.
[1] She is an emeritus professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics of Victoria University of Wellington.
[2] Pledger became a student at Victoria University of Wellington in 1961, and chose mathematics over physics because of its more welcoming environment to women at that time.
Originally intending to go into secondary-school education, she was instead persuaded by the department head, professor J. T. Campbell, to become a lecturer in mathematics at Victoria University of Wellington in 1965.
She married another new lecturer in mathematics, Ken Pledger, in 1967, and gave up her lecturership in 1970 soon before the birth of their first child.