Until a few decades ago, the norm in American society was for the husband to work full-time and be be sole “breadwinner” while his wife stayed at home and attended to the kids and maintained the household. As we all know, times have changed since then. These days, the norm is for both spouses to work to ensure financial stability for their family. But how do spouses deal with and divide up the household duties these days? As the New York Times report, contrary to many perceptions, there seems to be increasing levels of agreement among men and women on that issue:

[W]omen and men are becoming more alike in their attitudes toward balancing life at home and at work. . . . In one of the most comprehensive reviews of current research on families and work, Dr. Monahan Lang and Barbara J. Risman, chairwoman of the sociology department at the University of Illinois in Chicago, analyzed findings from studies based on national census data, in-depth interviews, and dozens of surveys for a conference organized by the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonpartisan group of researchers and clinicians.

What they found were more similarities than differences in men and women. “The evidence overwhelmingly shows an ongoing shift toward what we call ‘gender convergence,’ an ever-increasing similarity in how men and women live and what they want from their lives,” Dr. Monahan Lang and Dr. Risman write. Several other social scientists at the conference who are doing independent research have come to similar conclusions.

Ellen Galinsky, president of the Family and Work Institute, said many more men were reporting feeling tension between family and work life, even if their wives stayed home. And in a report about parents at Fortune 100 companies published in December, Rosalind Chait Barnett, the director of the Community, Families and Work Program at Brandeis University, found that when it came to concern over how their children spent their time after school, fathers and mothers were virtually the same.

The general message here is that, in the face of recent changes in the economic structure of American society that has made it increasingly difficult to achieve the “American dream,” working men and women are increasingly converging in terms of their attitudes and expectations on maintaining the work-family balance in order to adapt and prosper. In other words, more couples understand that surviving and trying to achieve social mobility in these turbulent times requires greater teamwork.

With that in mind, the other part of the equation is what is the government going to do, if anything to help out these working families? The evidence is clear -- and President Bush has directly admitted as well -- that wealth inequality is an increasing problem in American society. The data clearly show that these days, the typical American family is likely to do financially worse than their parents did a generation ago. In the meantime, the top 5% of American society keeps getting richer and control an ever-growing share of the nation’s wealth.

In other words, it’s great that working men and women are increasingly on the same wavelength on what it takes to get ahead in American society, but the bigger issue is, why is it so hard to get ahead in American society these days? More importantly, who is the government going to help more in trying to get ahead -- the richest 5% of Americans or the rest of the bottom 95% of us?