Gender-biased technological change: Milking machines and the exodus of women from farming

Philipp Ager, Marc Goñi () and Kjell Gunnar Salvanes ()
Additional contact information
Marc Goñi: University of Bergen
Kjell Gunnar Salvanes: Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Postal: NHH, Department of Economics, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway, https://www.nhh.no/en/employees/faculty/kjell-gunnar-salvanes/

No 16/2023, Discussion Paper Series in Economics from Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Farming; Gender bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 100 pages
Date: 2023-07-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3083793 Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender-Biased Technological Change: Milking Machines and the Exodus of Woman From Farming (2024)
Working Paper: Gender-biased technological change: Milking machines and the exodus of women from farming (2023)
Working Paper: Gender-Biased Technological Change: Milking Machines and the Exodus of Women from Farming (2023)
Working Paper: Gender-Biased Technological Change: Milking Machines and the Exodus of Women from Farming (2023)
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