Gender-Biased Technological Change: Milking Machines and the Exodus of Women from Farming

Arbeitspapier

This paper studies the link between gender-biased technological change in the agricultural sector and structural transformation in Norway. After WWII, Norwegian farms began widely adopting milking machines to replace the hand milking of cows, a task typically performed by women. Combining population-wide panel data from the Norwegian registry with municipality-level data from the Census of Agriculture, we show that the adoption of milking machines triggered a process of structural transformation by displacing young rural women from their traditional jobs on farms in dairy-intensive municipalities. The displaced women moved to urban areas where they acquired a higher level of education and found better-paid employment. These findings are consistent with the predictions of a Roy model of comparative advantage, extended to account for task automation and the gender division of labor in the agricultural sector. We also quantify significant inter-generational effects of this gender-biased technology adoption. Our results imply that the mechanization of farming has broken deeply rooted gender norms, transformed women's work, and improved their long-term educational and earning opportunities, relative to men.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 16347

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination ; Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity ; Agricultural Labor Markets ; Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers ; Economic History: Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy: Europe: 1913- ; Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology ; Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
• Subject: gender biased technological change ; migration ; intergenerational mobility

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Ager, Philipp ; Goñi, Marc ; Salvanes, Kjell G.
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2023

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/279045
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:45 AM CET