Geraldine Pratt

Gender, Work, and Space (1995), written with Susan Hanson, dismantled a comfortable explanation with data. Women on average work far closer to home than men, and this used to be read as a preference for balancing family life. Pratt and Hanson interviewed hundreds of households in Worcester, Massachusetts, and found something else: the unequal division of domestic and care work fixes women within a small radius, and inside that radius there are fewer jobs and worse pay.

The urban consequence is direct. A poorly connected neighbourhood does not affect all its residents equally: it genuinely shrinks the labour market available to whoever has to be back by the school bell. Accessibility, measured this way, stops being a technical transport problem and becomes a question of equality.

A Canadian geographer and professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Pratt has worked for decades with the city's Filipino community and with the Philippine Women Centre, in research done with those affected rather than about them.

Families Apart (2012) is the result of that collaboration: Canada's live-in caregiver programme allowed Filipina women to work as domestic employees and later reunite with their children, but the wait ran to many years, and the book documents what happens to a family when the mother raises someone else's children ten thousand kilometres from her own. Pratt has taken that material into documentary theatre to move it beyond the academic circuit.