Women in the broader Spanish population outnumber men by 900,000, totaling an estimated group of 24 million (as of July 2017).

During the Francoist era, Spanish social values codified a stance of morality that established rigid standards of female sexuality by restricting employment opportunities and prohibiting divorce, contraception, and abortion.

[5] In the traditional Spanish world, women rarely entered or sustained careers in the national labor market.

[5] Women still comprised less than one-third of the total labor force, and in some prominent sectors, such as banking, the figure was closer to one-tenth.

[5] A 1977 opinion poll revealed that when asked whether a woman's place was in the home only 22% of young people in Spain agreed, compared with 26% in Britain, 30% in Italy, and 37% in France.

[5] The principal barrier to women in the work place was not social pressure, but rather factors such as a high unemployment rate and a lack of part-time jobs.

Since the church prohibited divorce, a marriage could be dissolved only through the arduous procedure of annulment, which was available only after a lengthy series of administrative steps and was thus accessible only to the relatively wealthy.

In the summer of 1981, the Congress of Deputies (lower chamber of the Cortes Generales, or Spanish Parliament) finally approved a divorce law with the votes of about thirty Union of the Democratic Center (Union de Centro Democratico or UCD) deputies who defied the instructions of party conservatives.

As a consequence, Spain had a divorce law that permitted the termination of a marriage in as little as two years following the legal separation of the partners.

It was not until deciding a 1987 case, for example, that Spain's Supreme Court held that a rape victim need not prove that she had fought to defend herself in order to verify the truth of her allegation.

[5] In recent years, the role of women has largely increased in Spain, especially in politics but also in the labor market and other public areas.

Even so, Spanish women are quickly approaching their European counterparts, and the younger generations perceive machismo as outdated.

In the European Values Study (EVS) of 2008, the percentage of Spanish respondents who agreed with the assertion that "Marriage is an outdated institution" was 31.2%.

Before 1963, husbands and fathers who killed their wives and daughters whom they discovered committing adultery or premarital sex incurred only the symbolic punishment of destierro.

[26] Many protests rose around Spain, due to the verdict in 2018 regarding an 18-year-old woman who was assaulted at a bull-running festival in Pamplona.

The word has been claimed by feminists and women's rights groups as a term to explain one of the aspects of machismo in Hispanic and Latino communities.

[31] Abortion in Spain is legal upon request up to 14 weeks of pregnancy, and at later stages for serious risk to the health of the woman or fetal defects.

Abortion remains a controversial political issue in Spain, but regular moves to restrict it have lacked majority support.