@TechReport{iza:izadps:dp16347,
            	author={Ager, Philipp and Goñi, Marc and Salvanes, Kjell G.},
            	title={Gender-Biased Technological Change: Milking Machines and the Exodus of Women from Farming},
            	year={2023},
	month={Jul},
            	institution={Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)},
            	address={Bonn},
            	type={IZA Discussion Paper},
            	number={16347},
            	url={https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp16347},
	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.},
	keywords={gender biased technological change;migration;intergenerational mobility},
            }