Rhona Rapoport is Director of the Institute of Family and Environmental Research in London. She has served as Visiting Scholar with The Ford Foundation, and as Distinguished Fellow with the Simmons Graduate School of Management.

Rhona Rapoport was born in Cape Town, South Africa. She attended the University of Cape Town for her undergraduate education, did her postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics, London University, and received psychoanalytic training at the London Institute of Psychoanalysis. She is an Associate Member of the British Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytical Association.

From the late 1940s through the 1970s, Rhona Rapoport held many positions in the social sciences, conducting both field work and research projects in South Africa, England, Uganda, and in the United States. In 1979, she became a founding member of the Study Commission on the Family in London, and from 1980 through 1985, served as a member of the working party on work and the family at the Vienna Centre for Documentation and Research in the Social Sciences.

Rhona Rapoport has served as a Consultant to many organizations, including the Institute of Family Studies in Melbourne, Australia, The Ford Foundation, Lichfield and Partners, the Rowntree Memorial Trust, CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research), and the Body Shop International Action Research Project.

Her groundbreaking, multidisciplinary publications include some of the seminal writings of the work-family field, including studies of social and demographic change, family and women’s social psychology, gender roles, marriage and a variety of work-family issues, from her 1976 book with her husband, Robert, Dual Career Families Re-examined to 2002’s Beyond Work-Family Balance: Advancing Gender Equity and Work Performance (with Lotte Bailyn, Joyce Fletcher, Bettye Pruitt). She currently has a number of publications arising out of a project (funded by the Ford Foundation), entitled: Looking Backwards to Go Forwards: Work-Personal Life Integration in Seven Countries.

Rhona Rapoport and her late husband and working partner Robert have two children, Lorna and Alin, and two grandchildren, Tayo and Iola.