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 most common reference is to two male economists, Alan Blinder[4] and Ronald Oaxca [4] who published the same result almost twenty years later; neither paper cited Kitagawa.
Biography
She was born as Evelyn Mae Rose, in 1920[5] in Hanford, California, to a family of Portuguese Catholic descent.[6] 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.[6]
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.[6]
References
- 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.
- 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.
- Kitagawa, Evelyn M. "Components of a difference between two rates." Journal of the american statistical association 50, no. 272 (1955): 1168-1194.
- Blinder, Alan S. "Wage discrimination: reduced form and structural estimates." Journal of Human resources (1973): 436-455.
- 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.
- Anne Rose Kitagawa. UO Today, 23 July 2012, No. 504. YouTube. Retrieved 12 April 2016.
Further reading
- Deegan, Mary Jo (1995). "The Second Sex and the Chicago School: Women's Accounts, Knowledge, and Work 1945–1960". In Gusfield, Joseph R. (ed.). A Second Chicago School?: The Development of a Postwar American Sociology. University of Chicago Press. pp. 322–363. ISBN 0-226-24939-5.