Around two-thirds of both men and women believe women should be in paid jobs, according to the results of a poll from the International Labour Organization (ILO) and Gallup.
The 70 percent of women who would prefer that women work at paid jobs rather than stay at home full-time only narrowly outpaces the 66 percent of men who believe the same.
Of the three options given to respondents, 41 percent of women preferred those of their gender being in situations in which they could both work and mind their families, 29 percent opted for working at a paid job and only 27 percent elected staying at home full-time.
This only slightly differed from the 29 percent of men whose first choice was that women remained full-time within the home.
Yet despite the apparently encouraging results for those pursuing gender equality, widespread calls continue across many countries for more policy support to facilitate greater labor participation for the so-called fairer gender.
"Family-supportive policies, which enable women to remain and progress in paid employment and encourage men to take their fair share of care work, are crucial to achieving gender equality at work," ILO Director-General Guy Ryder said in the press release.
Indeed, beyond the first step of providing a societal framework which enables more women to work, many global initiatives now focus on ensuring that women are able to make career progress on a par with their male counterparts.
The concept that difficulties for women in paid jobs mount as they become more senior is so long established in the collective psyche that it has its own widely used term of "glass ceiling".
While results out from a separate survey released by Grant Thornton also on Wednesday indicated that a quarter of women hold senior management roles globally in 2017, a one percent improvement on last year, the poll reveals stark regional disparities.
While 31 percent of U.S. businesses have no senior women, Eastern Europe fared better with less than a tenth of businesses without women in senior roles. The Asia Pacific region proved a notable laggard with a total of 54 percent of businesses operating without a single senior woman.
The ILO/Gallup survey was released to co-incide with Wednesday's International Women's Day and claims to be representative of more than 99 percent of the global adult population, crunching responses from nearly 149,000 participants spread between 142 countries.
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