Kathleen Gales

Kathleen Gales
Gales in 1969
Born
Kathleen Emily Gales

(1927-12-02)2 December 1927
Died5 April 1995(1995-04-05) (aged 67)
Other names
  • Kathleen Emily Spitz
  • Mrs Heinz Spitz
Education
Spouse
Heinz Spitz
​
(m. 1970)​
Scientific career
FieldsStatistics
Workplaces

Kathleen Emily Gales (2 December 1927 – 5 April 1995) was an English statistician,[1] known for being the first woman lecturer at the Department of Statistics at the London School of Economics (LSE).[2]

Career

Gales was educated at Gateshead Grammar School before matriculating at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she earned her BA in 1950. A scholarship recipient, she went on to earn a Master's degree from Ohio University in 1951. Before becoming a lecturer at LSE, Gales worked as an assistant statistician at Foster Wheeler and as a statistician at the Municipal Statistical Office in Birmingham.[1] She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society in 1954.[3]

Gales joined LSE in 1955 as a research assistant and part-time lecturer.[1] She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1966[4] and held this position until her retirement in 1990.

Research

In 1964, Gales worked with Brian Abel-Smith on a study of British and Irish doctors' migration patterns. They found that of the doctors who had migrated away from the UK and Ireland, "expressed general objections to the principle of a National Health Service", contrary to the views of John R. Seale.[5]

Gales was briefly a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at University of California, Berkeley from 1964 to 1965. Her visiting professorship coincided with the start of the Free Speech Movement on campus, which was the subject of one of her studies, published in the British Journal of Sociology in 1966.[6] Returning to the UK, Gales collaborated on another study of student activism at LSE in 1967 alongside Tessa Blackstone (later Baroness Blackstone), Roger Hadley, and Wyn Lewis. The work was published as a monograph in 1970.[7]

Personal life

In 1970, Gales married Heinz Spitz, a schoolteacher of Maths and Scienes based in London. Spitz was a Jewish refugee who had fled Nazi-occupied Austria and arrived in the UK as part of the Kindertransport scheme in 1939. Gales died in 1995.[8]

Publications

  • Moser, C. A.; Gales, Kathleen; Morpurgo, P. W. R. (1962). Dental Health and the Dental Services: An Assessment of Available Data. Oxford University Press and the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust.
  • Abel-Smith, Brian; Gales, Kathleen (1964). British doctors at home and abroad. Occasional Papers on Social Administration. Vol. 8. Codicote Press.
  • Blackstone, Tessa; Gales, Kathleen; Hadley, Roger; Lewis, Wyn (1970). Students in Conflict: LSE in 1967. LSE Research Monographs. Vol. 5. London School of Economics and Political Science.
Gales delivering a lecture at LSE in 1964.
Gales (standing, third from the right) with colleagues at LSE's Department of Statistics in 1969.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Gales, Kathleen Emily, (Mrs Heinz Spitz)". Who's Who (147th ed.). A & C Black. 1995. p. 693. ISBN 0 7136 3995 4.
  2. ↑ @lsestatistics (17 April 2019). "Did you know Kathleen Gales (Spitz) was the first woman Professor in the Department of Statistics?" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  3. ↑ Gabor, Denis; Gabor, Andre (1954). "An Essay on the Mathematical Theory of Freedom". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General). 117 (1): 31. doi:10.2307/2342768. Full access available to users of The Wikipedia Library.
  4. ↑ "Current Notes". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General). 129 (4): 608–611. 1966. ISSN 0035-9238. Full access available to users of The Wikipedia Library.
  5. ↑ Abel-Smith, Brian; Gales, Kathleen (1964). "Emigration Of Doctors". The British Medical Journal. 2 (5400): 53–53. ISSN 0007-1447. Full access available to users of The Wikipedia Library.
  6. ↑ Gales, Kathleen E. (March 1966). "A Campus Revolution". The British Journal of Sociology. 17 (1): 1–19. doi:10.2307/588429. Full access available to users of The Wikipedia Library.
  7. ↑ Blackstone, Tessa; Gales, Kathleen; Hadley, Roger; Lewis, Wyn (1970). Students in Conflict: LSE in 1967. LSE Research Monographs. Vol. 5. London School of Economics and Political Science.
  8. ↑ Allen, Danny (24 June 2009). "Heinz Spitz". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 22 August 2026.
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