Slotwinski, Michaela and Alois Stutzer

Women leaving the playpen: The emancipating role of female suffrage
2023

We study how political empowerment affected women’s emancipation as reflected in their life choices. The staggered introduction of female suffrage in Swiss states allows us to exploit the variation in the age at which women were exposed to the right to vote to estimate the differences in life choices between women who were socialized in a world with politically empowered women and those who were socialized before. Our empirical findings document that early exposure to female suffrage increased female labor force participation, weakened marital bonds and motivated human capital investment.