Gender-Biased Technological Change: Milking Machines and the Exodus of Women from Farming
American Economic Review · 2026 · Philipp Ager、Marc Goñi、Kjell G. Salvanes
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. (JEL J16, J24, J43, J61, N34, N54, O33)