The Center for American Progress released a poll they took regarding creating policies to address work-family conflicts.

Men and women have a strong appetite for businesses and the government to implement policies to address work-family conflict. And it’s not only progressives who want change. These issues have strong resonance across a wide range of demographic groups. People agree across ideology, class, and family type that government and businesses need to do more to adapt to the new ways we work and live. This includes increased access to workplace flexibility, more funding for child care, and paid family and medical leave.

The findings summarized here come from a poll conducted with The Rockefeller Foundation and TIME during early September 2009. The poll interviewed more than 3,400 adults across the country about how changes in the economy are influencing attitudes about gender relations, family, and the workplace.

The poll confirmed that overwhelming majorities of both men and women believe that government and businesses need to adapt and that businesses that do not change will be left behind. The only issues that reveal ideological differences involve government-funded childcare and, to a lesser extent, requiring businesses to provide employees with more flexibility in hours or schedules. Yet even in these cases a majority of even conservative respondents agree that policies need to change.

This new poll data shows that policies to address work-family conflict carry out the message quite well and resonate with the American public. Families have for too long struggled to make their jobs fit their family life as the institutions around them continue to assume that the typical worker has a stay-at-home spouse and that the typical caregiver has a full-time breadwinner for income support. The public is hungry for change.

The poll findings confirm that as the day-to-day reality of how families work and live has changed, the public’s perception of the role of institutions has kept pace. The key transformation over the past half century in daily family life is that women now make up half of all workers in the United States. This is a threshold never reached before in the history of our nation, and as a result, mothers are now primary breadwinners in nearly 4 in 10 families — making as much or more than their spouse or doing it all on their own. And The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything found that two-thirds of mothers are breadwinners or co-breadwinners in their families — contributing at least a quarter of the family income.

These developments alone are a dramatic shift from the late 1960s when women were one-third of the workers in the United States and just over a quarter were breadwinners or co-breadwinners in their families. Our workforce has not only changed; the very makeup of our families is dramatically different than it was in the mid-1970s, when women began entering the workforce in larger numbers. Nearly half of families with children in 1975 consisted of a male breadwinner and a female homemaker. Today, that number is just one in five families. Single parents made up only 1 in 10 of our families with children in 1975. Today, single parent households are one in five of our families with children.

In The Shriver Report, top-notch academic and policy experts from around the country examined how the major institutions in our society—government, our health and education systems, business, faith-based institutions, and the media—are responding to these key changes in our society and where they fall short. The authors of the report found in each instance that our institutions are not adequately keeping up with these changes.

The poll data confirms that the public is looking for our institutions to adapt to this reality.

Women working is good for the economy and society

Question: Forty years ago just over one-third of all workers were women. Today about one-half of all workers are women. Do you think this change has been very positive, somewhat positive, somewhat negative, or very negative for American society/the American economy [split ballot]?

Our poll showed that most Americans agree that women working is good for the economy and society, and most also agree that our institutions need to embrace this new reality. Figure 1a shows that respondents from across the ideological spectrum — 87 percent of liberals and 69 percent of conservatives — agreed with this statement. And even 71 percent of evangelical Christians agreed. Figure 1d shows party affiliation, where 69 percent of Republicans agree, compared to 89 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of independents. [See table at the CAP site].

Continue at the Center for American Progress site for the entire article