In traditional Hungarian society, politics was a man's domain, but by supporting conservative values, women were able to gain power within the masculine system.

She built on the theme in the 2014 work, Political Justice in Budapest after World War II (originally published in 2012 in Hungarian), written with Ildikó Barna, which examined cases brought before the people's tribunal and their impact on post-war Jewish identity.

[15] Her analysis dismisses the easy answer of male aggression or punishment of otherness, noting that it was not simply invaders who raped and plundered Hungarian women during the war.

Pető's evaluation confirmed that ethnicity was not a driving factor, but that the increased levels of rapes were driven by alcohol consumption, lax military discipline, and "the fact that the occupying Soviet army fell outside of Hungarian [legal] jurisdiction".

Pető has also voiced opposition to "right to be forgotten" policies in the European Union, when they have to do with global events, such as the Holocaust and war crimes.

Following, they created research institutions peopled by those who ignored scientific protocols so that findings produced the narrative desired by the state, and eliminated independent publishing houses.

She has written for newspapers and magazines about the curtailment of women's rights, including the attempts to roll back abortion services which were first legalized in Hungary in 1945 in response to war-time sexual violence.

As a response to government inaction, the Central European University staff and students collected funds and opened their doors to the refugees fleeing to Hungary from Serbia since 2015.

[21] In 2021, in response to a plan to reduce qualifications for teacher training and a censorship request to remove comments critical of the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education in an upcoming article, Pető resigned her position on the Hungarian Accreditation Committee, on which she had served since 2018.

The prize recognized her extensive research on gender and contemporary European history including her work on the Holocaust, World War II, and political extremism.

Her works have been published in over 23 different languages,[10] including Bulgarian, Croatian, English, French, Georgian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, and Serbian.