I just want to second this point. I didn't really plan it out, so I ended up with a council republic before enacting women's suffrage. Now there's not enough political interest for me to change it, but I'm still getting the suffragette events. Hopefully that'll lead to something eventually, but if I had done it properly I could have made the change several years prior to where I am now.

At least now I've learned that you can swap interest groups in and out of your government to tweak laws as you need to, as long as you can do it without effecting your legitimacy too much. But more importantly, I learned that you can't even try to institute a law unless there's at least one interest group in your government that supports it. I learned that the hard way, while I was in the process of switching to a council republic. I kicked the intelligentsia and the industrialists out of government, without realizing that they were the only two groups supporting the women's suffrage law. And then they both joined the revolution trying to stop the change, which meant that they had no clout left when the civil war was over, so I had no way to change the suffrage law any more. Which is how I ended up in the situation I described at the top lol