Evelyn M. Kitagawa

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's Advisory Committee on Population Statistics.[1] 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.[1][2] Kitagawa wrote the first paper on decomposing statistics into components associated with the joint movement of the levels and returns to predictors.[3] This is noteworthy as an example of statistical sexism, in current publications in economics and even in sociology, her home discipline, the standard reference has become two economists, Alan Blinder[4] and Ronald Oaxca [5] who published the same result almost twenty years later; neither paper cited Kitagawa.

Biography

She was born as Evelyn Mae Rose, in 1920[6] in Hanford, California, to a family of Portuguese Catholic descent.[7] 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,[1] who had come to the US in 1941 as a divinity student and became an Episcopalian minister while interned. After marrying him, her family disowned her and she lost contact with them.[7]

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.[1]

Her honors included election as a fellow of the American Sociological Association (1959) and American Statistical Association (1968).

Her daughter, Anne Rose Kitagawa, is notable as a curator of Asian art.[7]

References
  1. Evelyn M. Kitagawa, University of Chicago Sociologist, 1920-2007, University of Chicago, September 20, 2007, retrieved 2016-08-23. Reprinted as "Evelyn M. Kitagawa 1930-2007", ASA Footnotes, American Sociological Association, 36 (8), November 2008.
  2. Myers, George C. (September 1974), "Differential Mortality in the United States: A Study in Socioeconomic Epidemiology by Evelyn M. Kitagawa, Philip M. Hauser", Review, American Journal of Sociology, 80 (2): 532–534, doi:10.1086/225814, JSTOR 2777516.
  3. Kitagawa, Evelyn M. "Components of a difference between two rates." Journal of the american statistical association 50, no. 272 (1955): 1168-1194.
  4. Blinder, Alan S. "Wage discrimination: reduced form and structural estimates." Journal of Human resources (1973): 436-455.
  5. Blinder, Alan S. "Wage discrimination: reduced form and structural estimates." Journal of Human resources (1973): 436-455.
  6. 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.
  7. Anne Rose Kitagawa. UO Today, 23 July 2012, No. 504. YouTube. Retrieved 12 April 2016.

Further reading
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