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Rhona Valerie Rapoport (29 January 1927 - 24 November 2011) was an American social scientist famous for her research into work-life balance She was a consultant for two decades at the Ford Foundation She worked at the Centre for Gender in Organisations at the Simmons Graduate School of Management in Boston during the 1990s.

2009 she was honoured by the organisation Working Families "for her sustained and influential research and new thinking in the field of work and family life".

Rhona Rapoport is a thought innovator whose work spans over 60 years and generates a better understanding for the work, life, gender, equity and diversity dilemmas of our time. Rhona has written numerous groundbreaking, pioneering works including ‘Work and Family in Contemporary Society’ (1965) and ‘Dual Career Families’ (1971), both written with her husband.

During the 1970s, it became clear that Government policy and individual efforts were not enough to create change, so Rhona began working with organisations to transform the way they managed employees’ work-life intergration.

Rhona also developed a training program on organisational change and work-family issues for advancing diverse groups in South Africa.

For over twenty years, she was an international consultant to the Ford Foundation working on affirmative action research programmes and on work and family issues in the USA and in developing countries.

Until recently, Rhona was Director of the Institute of Family and Environmental Research in London.

She currently works as a part-time freelance consultant in the hope that others will continue this work.

Rhona’s recent collaborative works include ‘Beyond Work-Family Balance: Advancing Gender Equity and Workplace Performance’ (2002) and ‘Work and Personal Life Integration: Looking Backwards to Go Forward’ [in ‘The Myth of Work-Life Balance: The Challenge of Our Time for Men, Women and Societies’] (2006).

Biography
Born Rhona Ross in Cape Town, South Africa, she said that her lifelong commitment to increasing equity originated in her observations of the status of servants in her childhood home. She rebelled against her parents' wish that she settle into their lifestyle. After completing a social sciences degree at the University of Cape Town in 1946, she took a PhD in sociology at the London School of Economics. Her first marriage, to Cyril Sofer in 1947, ended in divorce.

pioneering research into work and family issues at a time when psychologists studied workers, while sociologists separately studied families, with no consideration of how these parts of people's lives might interact. The article Work and Family in Contemporary Society, written by Rhona and her husband Robert Rapoport, and published in American Sociological Review in 1965, challenged this traditional mindset and launched a new discipline just as women were entering the workforce in large numbers. Their study examined what they called the "normal crises" of young couples leaving university, getting married and finding their first jobs.

The Rapoports' second path-breaking work was the book Dual-Career Families (1971). Based on intensive interviews, it examined how 17 dual-career couples (where both partners have their own professional careers) managed in combining work with family, friendship, leisure and community activities, and argued for the need to rethink the ways in which paid work and family work got done by both men and women.

In 1957 she completed training as a psychoanalyst at the London Institute of Psychoanalysis and married Robert Rapoport, an American social anthropologist. Until the mid-1960s, they lived in Boston, Massachusetts, where Rhona was director of family research at the community mental health programme of the Harvard Medical School and School of Public Health.

They then moved to London, where they both became associated with the Tavistock Institute. In 1973 they established the Institute for Family and Environmental Research, and served as co-directors until Robert's death in 1996. Rhona closed the institute in 2009.

Research
Published at a time when business and government leaders were finding that equal-opportunity legislation did not guarantee an adequate number of skilled women for professional positions, it started a discussion that ultimately led to widespread implementation of "family-friendly" policies in the workplace. In the 1990s, Rhona was instrumental in shifting the thinking on what were by then called "work-life" issues. As the leader of a Ford Foundation research initiative on issues of equity, conducted in collaboration with three large US corporations, she was the first to argue that it is not policies and benefits but the way work is accomplished that needs to change to alleviate work-life conflicts. She pointed the way to the emphasis on flexibility, for example in work schedules, that has spread widely in the US, the UK and beyond

wrote or co-wrote more than 20 books

Latterly, she challenged the popular mantra of finding "balance" between work and personal life. Beyond Work-Family Balance (2002) showed that allowing personal-life considerations into the workplace can help workers increase their effectiveness as well as their quality of life.

80-90 developed an approach to studying families that they called "collaborative interviewing and interactive research", a form of action research that actively engages the research subjects as partners in the investigation.