At home there was always a maid or housekeeper; Susan was sent to Frensham and Richard to Geelong Church of England Grammar School." 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. Murdoch commissioned Ashby to run research into the war effort, and Ashby ran the first Australia-wide public opinion survey. Murdoch later invited her to join him in establishing a public opinion subsidiary. Sir Frank Packer, rival proprietor of Australian Consolidated Press (ACP), got wind of the offer however, and put in a counter offer to make the Ashby Research Service a subsidiary of ACP. As Ashby had done work for the "Australian Women's Weekly" before the war, she chose to accept Packer's offer over Murdoch's. Murdoch then approached Roy Morgan to conduct opinion polling, and he organised the Australian Gallop Poll. From 1942 to 1944 the Ashby Research Service was renamed to the Daily Telegraph Research Bureau, but was renamed back to the Ashby Research Service after the war ended. Writing for "The Daily Telegraph" in her capacity as Director of the Daily Telegraph Research Bureau, Ashby caused a stir in July 1942 by proposing that the nation combine every two electorates and then subdivide them again into two electorates, to which women would elect a woman in one electorate, and men would elect a man in the second electorate. She felt this was necessary because "some of those who aspire to leadership unfortunately appear to have the habit of drawing upon themselves most unfavourable publicity, which distresses the average woman, who at heart (although her husband never guesses it) is a timid and shy creature, full of complexes, which cause her to withdraw into herself at the slightest sign of any thing in the nature of a public brawl." 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. After the Second World War ended, the Ashby Research Service saw a resurgence in business: surveys in 1945 included 14 for clients and 30 for ACP; in 1946 the number of surveys rose significantly, to 30 and 42 respectively. But the war had shown Ashby that revenue could be affected by external events; so she decided to conduct ongoing research surveys alongside her commissioned research to build up her existing data and attract new work. To this end, in 1945 she established the Ashby Consumer Panel as a trial in NSW and rolled out Australia-wide in 1947.