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.{{citation|title=Evelyn M. Kitagawa, University of Chicago Sociologist, 1920-2007|date=September 20, 2007|publisher=University of Chicago|access-date=2016-08-23|url=http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/07/070920.kitagawa.shtml}}. Reprinted as {{citation|title=Evelyn M. Kitagawa 1930-2007|url=http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/savvy/footnotes/nov08/obit.html#obit3|journal=ASA Footnotes|publisher=American Sociological Association|date=November 2008|volume=36|issue=8}}. 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.{{citation|department=Review|title=Differential Mortality in the United States: A Study in Socioeconomic Epidemiology by Evelyn M. Kitagawa, Philip M. Hauser|first=George C.|last=Myers|journal=American Journal of Sociology|volume=80|issue=2|date=September 1974|pages=532–534|jstor=2777516|doi=10.1086/225814}}.

Kitagawa wrote the first paper on decomposing statistics into components associated with the joint movement of the levels and returns to predictors, see Kitagawa decomposition.Kitagawa, Evelyn M. "Components of a difference between two rates." Journal of the american statistical association 50, no. 272 (1955): 1168-1194.

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.[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEJ1e8a5CVk 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 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 (1959) and American Statistical Association (1968).

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

Evelyn M. Kitagawa

Biography

References

Further reading