Although gender equality is legally enshrined, women continue to face disadvantages in the labor market as well as in other areas of public and private life due to their gender. This is evident, for example, in the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions, gender-specific income disparities, and other aspects examined here.

So how is female employment promoted in the countries studied here—Great Britain, France, and Sweden—to compensate for disadvantages and counteract their causes? The author analyzes and compares labor market policies as well as other political and social areas of the welfare state regimes and the embedded gender regimes to answer this question. She posits that the quantity and quality of strategies for promoting women depend on the type of gender regime, and that welfare states are converging in their policies regarding social security and labor market instruments, as EU-level standardized regulations concerning gender equality are established, which influence women's employment.