Evelyn Mae Kitagawa (1920 – September 15, 2007) was an American
sociologist and
demographer who worked as a professor at the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
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, ''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 Blinder
[Blinder, 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 1920
[The ''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
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
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
A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context.
In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements.
Within the context of higher education ...
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.[
]
References
Further reading
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Kitagawa, Evelyn Mae
1920 births
2007 deaths
People from Hanford, California
American demographers
American sociologists
American women sociologists
University of California, Berkeley alumni
University of Chicago alumni
University of Chicago faculty
Fellows of the American Statistical Association
20th-century American women
20th-century American people
21st-century American women