Author(s)
Philipp Ager
Marc Goñi
Kjell Salvanes

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.

Publication Type
Working Paper
File Description
First version, July 26, 2023
JEL Codes
J16: Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
J24: Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
J43 Particular Labor Markets: Agricultural Labor Markets
J61: Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
N34: Economic History: Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy: Europe: 1913-
O14 Economic Development: Industrialization, Manufacturing and Service Industries, Choice of Technology
O33 Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
Keywords
agriculture
World War II
geographic mobility