[Research Seminar] IFLAME: “Gender-biased technological change and structural transformation” M. GONI – Norwegian School of Economics

Speaker: Marc GONI
Norwegian School of Economics

Date and Location – Thursday June 16th 2022 from 12:00 to 13:30 on Zoom

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ABSTRACT

This paper studies the link between gender-biased technological change in the agricultural sector and the structural transformation in Norway. After WWII, Norwegian farms widely adopted milking machines to replace hand milking, a task typically done by women. Combining the population-wide panel of the Norwegian registry with municipality-level data from the Censuses 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 higher education and took up better-paid jobs. We also quantify significant inter-generational effects for the offspring of affected women. Our results imply that the mechanization of farming broke deeply rooted gender norms, transformed women’s work, and improved their long-term earning opportunities relative to men.