While Bulgaria is often described as a patriarchal society, women do have substantial authority in household budgeting or agricultural decision making.

Vesna Nikolić-Ristanović points out how at women made up two thirds of the unpaid workers present in Bulgaria during the 1990s.

[10] During the communist era, civil rights and freedoms for both women and men were equal, no matter how limited they were due to the authoritarian nature of the government.

[11] Many women entered paid employment during the socialist era, when an ideology of gender equality was promoted, and they made up nearly half the workforce in the late twentieth century.

Women are frequently employed as teachers, nurses, pharmacists, dentists, software developers, and in human resources, public administration, law, and as notaries.

[15] The employment rate for both sexes has been relatively low during the past two decades, due to hardships experienced by the national economy after the fall of the communism.

Nevertheless, the exact involvement in the labour force is quite difficult to determine, due to the presence of the unregulated informal sector.

There shall be no privileges or restriction of rights on the grounds of race, national or social origin, ethnic self-identity, sex, religion, education, opinion, political affiliation, personal or social status or property status".

At Article 4 it states: "Any direct or indirect discrimination on grounds of gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, human genome, citizenship, origin, religion or belief, education, convictions, political affiliation, personal or social status, disability, age, sexual orientation, marital status, property status, or on any other grounds established by law or by an international treaty to which the Republic of Bulgaria is a party, shall be banned.

The latter was sometimes explained in terms of the often large dowries of household goods and sometimes land or livestock that women traditionally took into marriage.

Houses were traditionally often inherited by youngest sons, who brought their wives to live in the family home.

While marriage was traditionally very important in Bulgaria, there has been a rapid increase in unmarried cohabitation after the fall of communism.

After the fall of communism, the legal and social pressure to get married has declined, and the population has started to experience new life styles.

[29] In the European Values Study (EVS) of 2008, the percentage of Bulgarian respondents who agreed with the assertion that "Marriage is an outdated institution" was 27.2%.

"[31] Despite legal equality, societal norms of the Balkan culture often consider the wife to be in a position of subordination to the husband.

[34] In 2015, Bulgaria repealed Article 158 of the Penal Code, which stated that a perpetrator of several sexual offences could escape prosecution by marrying the victim.