Gender-Biased Technological Change: Milking Machines and the Exodus of Women from Farming
Philipp Ager, Marc Goñi, Kjell G. Salvanes
American Economic Review · 2026 · Volume 116 · Issue 1
Abstract
This paper studies how gender-biased technological change in agriculture affected women's work in twentieth-century Norway. In the 1950s, dairy farms began widely adopting milking machines to replace milking cows by hand, a task typically performed by young women. We show that the machines pushed rural young women in dairy-intensive areas out of farming. The displaced women moved to cities where they acquired more education and found better-paying, skilled employment. Our results suggest that the adoption of milking machines broke up allocative inefficiencies associated with moving costs across sectors, which improved the economic status of women relative to men.
Keywords
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-, Economic History: Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment, and Extractive Industries: Europe: 1913-, Technological Change: Choices and Consequences, Diffusion Processes
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