09/04/2026 - 12:45 - Doyen 22

Cecilia García Peñalosa

(Aix - Marseille School of Economics)

will give a presentation on 

Technology Adoption and Women’s Rights: Evidence from Switzerland (with Bjorn Brey and Edoardo Cefala)

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 groundbreaking 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. 

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