It’s Time for Policies to Match Modern Family Needs
New Polling Data Shows Widespread Support for an Agenda to Address Work-Family Conflict
SOURCE: AP/David ZalubowskiKristie McNealy works on her laptop computer while her children join her at the dining room table in the family's home in Aurora, Colorado.
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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
