Meanwhile, we had this female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, behaving more butch than most men. She showed us that women could be just as assertive, strong, and authoritarian as men. In her we saw a woman who did not shy away from showing how much she loved power. That made it legitimate for us to love it too.

What do these ideas mean for social policy? After all, that's where most activists still focus their attention.

In this new world, the old industrial-era separation of work and home disappears. Or rather, there is greater porousness between the two -- more blurring between the spheres that have defined our identity as men and women. Where the old system relied on rigid roles, the new system relies on a convergence between family relationships and paid work. Work is home, and home is work. It's redolent of our preindustrial past, but with a peculiar modern spin driven by globalization and technology.

But our politics haven't caught up with the new paradigm. Instead, we get the same old debate: Traditional feminists see marriage and family life as problematic. Conservatives, on the other hand, see women's participation in politics as having a grievous effect on family life. Neither view really comprehends the full aspect of gender change, which is a story of decline and progress. Convergence has brought women greater freedom and autonomy -- but not without some costs, which have been borne mostly by children.

You can't fix gender inequality without fixing men's relationships to the home and their roles as parents. That means legitimating them and giving them power in those spheres -- the power, if you will, that women have had historically. But that requires addressing the economic imbalance.

What we're seeing today is a philosophy that recognizes families as the primary basis of social capital from which all sorts of dividends accrue. The breakdown of relationships, of families, is bad not only for individuals but also for society. If we live in an era when both men and women work, when we can no longer rely on women to work exclusively at home, then we have to seek out a new balance of work and family.

We're going to have to rebuild the social infrastructure. Some changes are simple, like changing school hours and those of other public institutions to better fit parents' work schedules. National insurance contributions could be diverted into accounts that would fund training sabbaticals or periods of parenting.

We're also going to need policies like paid parental leave. Both the U.S. and Britain have passed laws requiring employers to offer unpaid leave to new parents. But as long as men earn more than women, unpaid leave doesn't address the inequalities of time spent on parenting and in the home. As long as men earn more, they'll have an incentive to work more. We either have to fix the pay gap or offer paid parental leave so that men will have the same economic incentive to stay home as women do.

If we "knowledge workers" are so smart, then why do issues of men and women, of work and life, seem so hard to address?

The entrance of women into the workforce has exposed the economic value of family. Families have always had economic value, but it wasn't visible because women did the work. Now, in effect, women have gone on strike. We've had a decline in the birthrate, and less housework is getting done. What we've learned is that we have to value and nurture the private sphere, because if we don't, society comes under strain. There's an economic cost to that.

In the last generation, we had a system based on the male breadwinner. Now that's been torn asunder, and we haven't found the new system. Instead, ambiguity is the reigning feature. And I think that ambiguity is permanent. We've come out of a very black-and-white culture in which roles were very clearly demarcated, and moved into a land of technicolor -- a kind of crazy patchwork painting. Men and women may have come to a much closer, more equal place, but we're still coming from very different places, right?

Keith H. Hammonds (khammonds@fastcompany.com), a Fast Company senior editor, is based in New York City. Contact Helen Wilkinson by email (hwilkins@netcomuk.co.uk).

Sidebar: What's Fast

According to Helen Wilkinson, the relationship between men, women, and work is undergoing an epochal shift -- and in the coming years, it needs to change still further. Here, adapted from her book "No Turning Back: Generations and the Genderquake," are Wilkinson's prescriptions for gender and family in the 21st century.

Rewrite our rights.

Our inherited framework of rights needs to be extended to fit the new working, living, and learning realities of our times. That means guaranteeing pensions, benefits, and learning opportunities for women and men whose work is discontinuous, part-time, or insecure in some way.