Do Free Trade Agreements Strengthen or Erode Women’s Civil Liberties?

Does deeper trade integration advance or undermine women’s civil liberties, their freedom of movement, property rights, freedom from forced labor, and access to justice? Trade can raise women’s civil standing by expanding female employment and bargaining power, by importing legal commitments through labor and dispute-settlement chapters, and through rule-of-law spillovers. However, it can erode that standing through coercive export-sector labor practices, competitive deregulation, and the displacement of women from protected sectors. We estimate the effect of entering a free trade agreement with the United States on women’s civil liberties for all the countries with bilateral agreements drawing on an annual panel of 182 countries observed from 1970 to 2025. When applying a staggered difference-in-differences estimator with common support we find a decline of roughly five percent of a cross-country standard deviation, which is robust to a broad battery of empirical tests. Our results caution against the optimistic view that trade agreements diffuse women’s rights.