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  5. Gender-Biased Technological Change: Milking Machines And the Exodus of Women from Farming

American Economic Review

ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)

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

  • Philipp Ager
  • Marc Goñi
  • Kjell G. Salvanes
American Economic Review (Forthcoming)

Abstract

This paper studies how gender-biased technological change in agriculture affected women’s work in 20th-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 betterpaying 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.

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