Nearly three-quarters of respondents now dispute the place of men and women in terms of home and work

In the 1950s, it was a given that women should have dinner ready, touch up their makeup, tidy up and silence the children before their husbands came home from work.

How far we’ve come. According to a new survey, entitled British Social Attitudes 35, nearly three-quarters of the British public now disagree with the attitude that women should look after the home while men are out earning a living.

Traditional views of gender roles have continued to decline, according to the latest survey of social attitudes by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), with 72% disputing the conservative view that women should dedicate themselves to housework, compared with 58% 10 years ago.

The reverse opinion held as recently as 1988, when 48% felt a woman’s place was in the home and only a third disagreed with the traditional model of family life.

Men lag six percentage points behind women in their abandonment of traditional roles, the data showed. Age too, was a factor: 45- to 54-year-olds were most likely to disagree with women staying at home. And those with more educations and higher household incomes were also more likely to support women in the workplace.

Attitudes towards mothers of young children going to work were more nuanced, with a third of Britons saying they thought those with pre-school children should remain at home – a figure unchanged in five years.

In that period, there has been a fall of five percentage points in the proportion who believe those women should take up part-time work, to 38%. There was also a slight fall in the proportion of respondents who thought mothers should work part- or full-time once their offspring are at school, down four points to 76%.

The people of Britain are moving away from the idea that men should be breadwinners and women homemakers. Nancy Kelley, NatCen

“The people of Britain are moving away from the idea that men should be breadwinners and women homemakers,” said Nancy Kelley, the deputy chief executive of NatCen.

“Yet when we asked people if they thought mothers of pre-school age children should work, we found no increase in support in recent years, against a backdrop of several policy changes aiming to help working families manage work and childcare.

“People are supportive of parental leave being shared between men and women but, in practice, very few actually do. This suggests that government must look beyond the law if they are hoping to balance raising a child between mums and dads.”

Every year since 1983, NatCen has interviewed more than 3,000 people about life in the UK and the way that the country is run. New questions are added each year, but all are designed with the intent of repeating them to chart changes in attitudes over time.

This year, for the first time, in the wake of the #metoo phenomenon, NatCen explored attitudes around a man commenting loudly on a woman’s appearance in the street, by asking respondents their opinion of a scenario in which the man loudly comments that she “looks gorgeous”.

The findings were surprising: overall, uninvited comments from men about a woman’s appearance were thought to be wrong by 57%. But while 61% of men thought such remarks were wrong, just 52% of women were of the same opinion.

This year’s survey comes at a turbulent time for the country as the government battles within itself to reach an agreement over the terms of leaving the European Union, public services falter after a decade of austerity policies and social cohesion comes under threat from tensions between generations, ethnicities and economic status.

On Brexit, NatCen found that support for leaving the European Union had increased considerably since 2015. That year, only 22% said they wanted to leave the EU; now, 36% hold that view.

Paradoxically, however, the rise in support for leaving the EU has been accompanied by an increase in the number of people who believe that the country will be economically worse off as a result – from 40% to 45% since 2015 – and an increase in the number of people who feel strongly European, up six points to 31%.

• This article was amended on 11 July 2018. An earlier version said that figures from NatCen showed “support for leaving the European Union had increased considerably since the referendum in 2015.” The referendum was in 2016, and the the sentence has been corrected to say “since 2015.”