[AEW Webinar] Gender-Biased Technological Change: Milking Machines and the Exodus of Women from Farming
◈ 발표자 : Philipp Ager (Mannheim)
◈ 일 시 : 2025년 2월 6일 목요일 16:00 ~ 17:45
◈ 장 소 : Webinar via WebEx
Webinar 참석을 위해 아래 링크를 통한 사전 등록이 필요합니다: (https://ntucc.webex.com/weblink/register/r5af39bda3fae52ef477029cea93456bf)
Gender-Biased Technological Change: Milking Machines and the Exodus of Women from Farming
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.