Rhona Rapoport

Rhona Valerie Rapoport (29 January 1927 – 24 November 2011) was a South African social scientist known for her research into work-life balance. Rapoport's 60 years of research and writing focused on work, life, gender, equity, and diversity. She did this by working closely with her husband and government agencies in a number of different countries.

Biography
Rapoport was born as Rhona Ross in Cape Town, South Africa. She earned an undergraduate degree in social sciences from the University of Cape Town in 1946, and a PhD in sociology from the London School of Economics. Rapoport trained to be a psychoanalyst at the London Institute of Psychoanalysis.

In 1957, Rhona married social anthropologist Robert Rapoport. They lived in Boston, Massachusetts, where Rhona was the Director of Family Research at the community mental health programme of the Harvard Medical School and the School of Public Health. In the mid-1960s, the couple moved to work with the Tavistock Institute in London and in 1973, they established the Institute of Family and Environmental Research in London. She worked at the Centre for Gender in Organisations at the Simmons Graduate School of Management in Boston during the 1990s and wrote or co-wrote more than 20 books.

For two decades, Rapoport worked as a consultant for the Ford Foundation, where she developed the technique of action research to support the participants in her studies. In 2009, she was honored by the organisation Working Families "for her sustained and influential research and new thinking in the field of work and family life".

Rapoport died in 2011. Her ashes were buried with her husband's on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery.