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]

She was born as Evelyn Mae Rose, in 1920[3] in Hanford, California, to a family of Portuguese Catholic descent.[4] 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.[4]

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.[4]