A pioneer in the field, she was the first female market researcher in Australia and the United Kingdom, and the first person to conduct an Australia-wide public opinion poll.
[4] In 1923 Ashby started two years of training at a business college run by Frederick Zerko,[4] after which she took up a secretarial job at J. Walter Thompson Australia Pty Ltd (colloquially known as JWT).
[5] The company downsized considerably when it lost the General Motors account, due to the Great Depression, and Ashby was relocated to the Sydney office.
[7] Though the Australian Dictionary of Biography notes that "she spent much time reorganizing his library",[4] Ashby found the contacts invaluable and the experience highly rewarding[8]—particularly in that it taught her "to be always on the look-out for ideas for campaigns".
[7] During this time she also worked with the German Ministry for Propaganda, conducting research into how to improve relations between Britain and Germany, though when it was leaked to the public, sentiment was such that she immediately withdrew from that program.
Although she almost immediately secured a contract with an advertising agency to conduct a three-month-long survey of Melbourne's leading evening newspaper The Argus,[4] it was nevertheless a difficult start.
[12] She preferred unmarried women, as she believed that "a single woman is better able to concentrate solely upon the problem on hand [and] has no home worries to distract her [and] has more time to keep herself physically fit".
Those who displayed a lack of appropriate deportment, she maintained, would cause suspicion and sometimes hostility, and the interviewee would be unresponsive to questioning, leading to poor survey results.
At one point Ashby herself was vigorously questioned over several hours by the police, who accused her of "disloyalty" and threatened her with arrest if she did not stop surveying popular opinion on the war and the Prime Minister.
[16] At the same time, rationing meant that firms were less concerned with marketing efforts as the availability of goods became more scarce and consumers were more likely to buy what they could find.
[17][18] Despite her previously expressed views on the capabilities of married women at work, the Australian Dictionary of Biography notes that "busy and ambitious as she was, Sylvia did not neglect her two children.
"[4] Her wartime polling gained the attention of Sir Keith Murdoch, who not only ran the Herald & Weekly Times but was also briefly Director-General of Information for the Australian government in 1940.
By allowing each citizen to only vote for their own gender, Ashby believed this would encourage a better class of female candidate and women would become more politically engaged.
[23] In light of this influx and the more general post-war population boom, she also regularly requested new equipment from Packer, including an electric calculator and a punching machine.
Periodical overseas visits are essential to a Director of Market Research and this was discussed prior to the signing of my initial contract.
This caused ACP to demand a full audit; but Ashby put together a strident defence, pointing out that it was the only time in the subsidiary's history that their expenditure exceeded their revenue.
To her frustration, Ashby found that her subsidiary was being underused by ACP, and regularly wrote to Packer to suggest ways of using her services.
[27] Ashby, who was by this time becoming very ill, sold the business to Beacon Research Co. Pty Ltd.[4] As her health continued to fail, she became confined to a wheelchair, before finally dying of cancer on 9 September 1978 at Palm Beach, New South Wales and was cremated.