The percentage of Americans who oppose women's equality in both the home and the workplace has plummeted since the 1970s, according to a recent study based on survey results from more than 27,000 people.
But the news isn't all good for women seeking a level playing field.
"What our study found is that the vast majority of Americans are really comfortable with women working," said William Scarborough, a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and co-author of the study.
"But in the home, there's this persistence of belief that women are better suited for caregiving and, specifically, child care."
The study, which pooled responses to the General Social Survey, found that attitudes toward gender equality fell into three basic categories: traditional, egalitarian and ambivalent.
Traditionals, who oppose gender equality both at home and at work, were dominant in 1977, with 60 percent of Americans falling into that category. In sharp contrast, only 7 percent of Americans were traditionals in 2016, according to the study, which was published in the journal Gender & Society.
But the authors found that while traditional views decreased over the decades, there was a rise in the number of people who supported gender equality in the home or the workplace, but not both.
These ambivalents made up 24 percent of the population in 2016. Most ambivalents favored equality in the workplace but not at home, where they think women should do more of the cleaning and child care than men.