Technology Adoption and Women’s Rights: Evidence from Switzerland

Bjorn Brey, Edoardo Cefala and García-Peñalosa, Cecilia

No 21271, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Gender equality and economic growth have historically tended to move together yet identifying causal effects has been difficult. This paper uses data on the support for female suffrage in Switzerland in order to explore the impact of technology adoption on gender norms. We argue that the early adoption of electricity was conducive to local economic development, which in turn led to more egalitarian views on gender. To identify causality, we exploit geographic differences in the potential to generate electricity from waterpower. Our results show that early electricity adoption (by the 1910s) had a lasting impact on municipality vote shares in support of female suffrage in the ground-breaking 1959 referendum. We complement this finding with Cantonal referendums on female voting rights and federal electoral results to show that higher support for female political participation is observed in the data since the 1920s. We then examine how technology may have shaped gender attitudes and find that increased educational investment explains part of the shift. Fertility appears to respond to changing gender norms and reinforce them, but is unlikely the key mechanism in the causal chain.

Keywords: Technological; change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 N33 O14 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21271 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21271

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP21271

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().