Abstract. We provide new evidence on how a gender-biased, labor-saving technology—the milking machine—advanced one important dimension of gender equality: women’s political representation. Our focus is mid-20th-century Finland, where mechanized milking reduced the time burden of a task traditionally performed by women and facilitated modernization of rural parts of the country. Using historical data, we estimate panel and instrumental-variable models that exploit temporal variation in the spread of milking machines and geographic variation in pre-determined comparative advantage in cattle farming. We find that municipalities with greater adoption of milking machines experienced significantly larger increases in women’s representation on local councils between 1950 and 1972. These effects operated through time savings, rural economic development, and an increase in women’s employment off the farm, which together helped ease key constraints to women’s political representation. Read the working paper.
Paper presentations
Presentation – ASWEDE at Nääs fabriker, November 17th, 2025
Presentation – ASREC Europe Conference 2025 at University of Copenhagen, September 18th, 2025
Presentation – ASREC Graduate Student Workshop at University of Copenhagen, September 17th, 2025
Poster session – Social Norms in Development at The Royal Swedish Academy of Science, September 9th, 2025
Poster session – Workshop in Economic History at Uppsala University, May 23rd, 2025
Project Presentation – 4th Norwegian Winter Games in Economic History (Norsk Økonomisk Historisk Forening), Norwegian University of Science and Technology, January 29th, 2026
Research Proposal Presentation – Sudswec (Stockholm-Uppsala Doctoral Student Workshop in Economics) at Stockholm School of Economics, October 3rd, 2025
Discussant – ENTER Jamboree at Stockholm School of Economics, June 9th, 2025