She held the first professorship for women's studies in Austria, based at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Innsbruck.
From 1975 to 1986, Werlhof worked as a research assistant at the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University with a focus on development policy, where she helped to establish the practice area Women and Third World together with Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen (de).
In 1984, Werlhof habilitated in political science at the University of Frankfurt with a thesis on the woman question and agriculture policy in the Third World.
Together with Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, she is a co-founder of ecofeminism and developed the feminist Bielefeld subsistence perspective, which took up the subsistence approach of Georg Elwert et al. and emphasized that subsistence production is not only an important component in developing countries, but also plays a major role in capitalist Societies of the Center: the domestic work of women reduces the reproductive costs of the male wage worker and thus subsidizes the capitalist sector.
Instead, they argued, work was being pushed back into the domestic sphere, where women produce for low wages for the world market.
[4] They analysed that subsistence production, which serves the immediate creation and maintenance of life, is subject to a constant social devaluation process, which, according to Werlhof, is linked to the modern understanding of nature and is not gender-neutral.
[6] The Bielefeld subsistence perspective was further developed within and outside of scientific research, various groups and initiatives related to it, which led to the founding of the Institut für Theorie und Praxis der Subsistenz e.V.
The social education worker Iman Attia, for example, accused eco-feminism and Werlhof's and her fellow campaigners' perspective on subsistence of mythologizing the housewife and mother, which only intensified the oppression they were trying to fight.