Gender-Biased Technological Change: Milking Machines and the Exodus of Woman From Farming

Philipp Ager, Marc Goni () and Kjell G Salvanes

CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany

Abstract: This paper studies how gender-biased technological change in agriculture affected women’s work in 20th-century Norway. After WWII, dairy farms began widely adopting milking machines to replace the hand milking of cows, a task typically performed by young women. We show that the adoption of milking machines pushed young rural women out of farming in dairy-intensive municipalities. The displaced women moved to cities where they acquired more education and found better-paid employment. Our results suggest that the adoption of milking machines broke up allocative inefficiencies across sectors, which improved the economic status of women relative to men.

Keywords: Technological change; rural-to-urban migration; gender effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J24 J43 J61 N34 O14 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66
Date: 2024-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-his, nep-lab, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp535 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2024_535

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany Kaiserstr. 1, 53113 Bonn , Germany.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CRC Office ().