Evelyn Mae Kitagawa (1920 – September 15, 2007) was an American sociologist and demographer who worked as a professor at the University of Chicago and became president of the Population Association of America and chair of the

U.S. Census Bureau The United States Census Bureau (USCB), officially the Bureau of the Census, is a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System, responsible for producing data about the American people and economy. The Census Bureau is part of the ...

's Advisory Committee on Population Statistics.. Reprinted as . She is known for her book with

Philip Hauser Philip Morris Hauser (September 27, 1909 – December 13, 1994) was a demographer and pioneer in urban studies who was a president of the American Sociological Association, the American Statistical Association and the Population Association of ...

, ''Differential Mortality in the United States: A Study in Socioeconomic Epidemiology'', which discovered systematic correlations between the death rates of Americans and their income and level of education. Kitagawa wrote the first paper on decomposing statistics into components associated with the joint movement of the levels and returns to predictors. This is noteworthy as an example of statistical sexism, in current publications in economics and even in sociology, her home discipline, the most common reference is to two male economists, Alan BlinderBlinder, Alan S. "Wage discrimination: reduced form and structural estimates." Journal of Human resources (1973): 436-455. and Ronald Oaxca who published the same result almost twenty years later; neither paper cited Kitagawa.

Biography

She was born as Evelyn Mae Rose, in 1920The ''Footnotes'' obituary gives her birth date as 1930 but this appears to be a typo as it does not match her college graduation date. in Hanford, California, to a family of Portuguese Catholic descent.''Anne Rose Kitagawa''.
''UO Today'', 23 July 2012, No. 504. YouTube. Retrieved 12 April 2016. After earning a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1941, she began working for the War Relocation Authority, which ran the internment camps of Japanese-Americans during World War II, as head of its statistics unit. In one of the camps, she met her future husband, Joseph Mitsuo Kitagawa, who had come to the US in 1941 as a divinity student and became an

Episcopalian Anglicanism is a Western Christian tradition that has developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the context of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. It is one of the l ...

minister while interned. After marrying him, her family disowned her and she lost contact with them. Kitagawa earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1951. She worked for a local urban research center, and then became an assistant professor at Chicago in 1954. She stayed there for the rest of her career, with a promotion to full professor in 1970, until her 1989 retirement. Her husband also worked at Chicago, as professor of history of religions and dean of the divinity school. Her honors included election as a fellow of the

American Sociological Association The American Sociological Association (ASA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline and profession of sociology. Founded in December 1905 as the American Sociological Society at Johns Hopkins University by a group of fif ...

(1959) and American Statistical Association (1968). Her daughter,

Anne Rose Kitagawa Anne Rose Kitagawa (born 1965) is the chief curator of collections and Asian art and director of academic programs at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon. She is an authority of the Harvard Art Museums' ''Tale of Genji'' ...

, is notable as a curator of Asian art.

Biography

References

Further reading