Agree or disagree? "The father of the family must be master in his own house."

If you agreed, you are increasingly not alone. Agreement with this Environics questionnaire item, which measures the value Patriarchy, rose from 42 percent of Americans in 1992 to 52 percent agreement in 2004.

This rising number usually generates shock and dismay from progressive audiences. But there is another question in our survey that might make you feel better: 87 percent of Americans agreed that, "If they are equally qualified for a job, men and women must always be paid the same salary."

In other words, a large percentage of Americans believe both that the father should be master and that equally qualified women and men should receive equal pay. But how can this be?

We tend to think of ourselves as a single person with a single worldview. The truth is, we contain multitudes. Moreover, we are not the same people in every domain of life. And we express different values depending on the situation. The power of social values research is that, because we can ask so many questions -- over 500 -- we can get at the complexity and nuances of our multiple ways of seeing and reasoning about our worlds. In terms of gender we track multiple values, from Sexism to Patriarchy and Flexible Gender Identity to Gender Parity. In analyzing the gender survey questions, the "father as master" item relates to the private sphere, meaning an individual's preference for the family hierarchy. The "equally qualified" item measures something very different: a preference for how society should function in the public sphere. "It may be that equality in the public sphere is a more palatable goal than equality in the home for most Americans," Environics Canada President Michael Adams notes. "Embracing formal equality for women, telling little girls they can be lawyers and engineers, is one thing. Accepting profound changes in domestic life--especially changes facilitated by costly government programs--seems a much deeper challenge."