In contemporary societies, status as a wage worker is a fundamental source of social and political identity. Wage labour is also the main source of income for individuals, conditioning – to a large extent – access to property, patterns of consumption, and receipt of public benefits. In Jane Lewis's words, despite an unequal wage structure between the sexes, the ‘best way of avoiding poverty risks, for both men and women, according to statistics, is being in the labour market’.

Labour markets have almost always had gender disparities, with women in a secondary position in terms of wage levels and promotion opportunities. In present-day Europe, public policies are the primary mechanism for counterbalancing women's secondary position in the labour market and also within the family. But this has not always been the case. Among the profound changes in the character of European states during the nineteenth century was their transformation from being one of the mechanisms reinforcing and organizing labour markets along gender lines to becoming an institution that has promoted equal-opportunity policies in the twentieth century and attempted to improve women's disadvantaged position.