All cultures from prehistoric times to the present have drawn distinctions between men's work and women's work. In some societies these distinctions are so strong that individuals who are morphologically male but who do tasks normally assigned to females are regarded as members of a third gender. The link between gender and work has not been this strong in European culture, but economic institutions, technological developments, cultural norms, religious and intellectual currents, and popular beliefs have all played a part in shaping clear distinctions between men's and women's work. These distinctions have, in turn, determined how tasks would be valued, with tasks normally done by men valued more highly than those done by women, even if they took the same amount of time, skill, and effort. In fact, the very definition of "work" has often been gender-biased, with men's tasks defined as "work" while women's have been defined as "assisting," "helping out," or "housework." Some tasks done by women, such as the care and nurturing of family members, have generally not been regarded as "work" at all.

In the same way that gender history in general grew out of women's history, the study of gender and work developed primarily out of studies on women's work. Economic and labor historians whose primary focus was work were often more attentive to class differences than to those of gender; their focus was the male work experience, but its gendered nature was not analyzed or explored. This is beginning to change, but there are still many more studies that focus explicitly on women's work than on men's work defined as such. Historians themselves have thus contributed to the notion that men's work is simply "work," whereas women's is "women's work," but this is slowly changing as more scholars recognize and highlight the gendered nature of their subjects. Gender hierarchies in the division of labor have survived massive economic changes in Europe over the last five hundred years, with new occupations valued—and paid—according to whether they were done primarily by men or women. This resiliency has led social historians into several different lines of investigation. One of these has been to search for the reasons why women's labor has been undervalued, a question historians began investigating as early as the 1920s. A second line of inquiry, which began in the 1970s, explores how economic changes, such as the development of commercial capitalism, industrial production, or the global labor market, were experienced differently by men and women. A third and more recent line of inquiry reverses the second, and investigates how gender hierarchies (or sometimes more pointedly stated, how patriarchy) shaped economic developments. In all of these areas, historians are increasingly cognizant not only of work itself but also of the meaning of work for individuals and for society at large. Thus they use as their sources economic data such as employment statistics, census records, business reports, union records, and account books, and also more subjective records such as letters, diaries, newspaper editorials, advertisements, and personal memoirs.