Chapter 6 provides an empirical analysis of women’s labor force participation in the EU 1998–2018 divided into four periods: 1998–2002, 2003–2007, 2008–2012, and 2013–2018. The periods are not fully comparable in terms of which countries included in analysis are yet formal EU member states or not. Other factors such as the global financial crisis that erupted in 2008 also leave their mark on the analysis and the periods studied should therefore be seen as “cases-within-the case” of the EU. In this way, the framework of gender-sensitive state power gets repeatedly tested in slightly different conditions. The chapter includes description of variation across countries in all periods studied and statistical tests of explanatory relationships. To provide a context to the results, the chapter starts with a review of research on factors either hindering or enabling women’s participation in paid work, focusing mainly on developments in Western Democracies.