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Growing numbers of women have been drawn into paid employment and have some independent access to economic resources, but wealth is stratified by gender as well as by other factors such as race, age and sexuality. The ways in which women are drawn into paid work vary within and between nation-states, depending on factors such as the level of development, the nature of the economy and the role of the welfare state. Orientalism is viewed as a discourse in which the West's knowledge of the Orient is bound up with its economic and political dominance. Feminist geographers examine the contingent socio-geographic relations that produce multiple discursive subjectivities and multiple discursive meanings of space and place. Feminist historians analysing women's work in the pre-industrial West have shown that women participated in production and played a key role in, for example, cottage industry.