Economists have long argued that technologies can exhibit gender-biased impacts, often focusing on gender-specific innovations such as plowing and weaving. This study shifts the focus to woodblock printing—a seemingly gender-neutral technology—and examines its long-term gendered impact on educational outcomes in China. Combining historical data on poet presence with cohort-level literacy data from the 1982 Census, I find that women’s educational outcomes derived greater marginal benefits than men’s from increased availability of woodblock-printed books, a pattern that persisted until the onset of Mao’s Mass Education Reform in 1949. To address potential endogeneity, I employ an instrument variable strategy that exploits river distance to locations suitable for bamboo cultivation (a crucial raw material for printing paper) as an exogenous source of variation in woodblock printing availability. I attribute the historical root of female-biased impact to the substitutive role of woodblock printing for formal schooling, from which women were largely excluded during the Imperial Period. Moreover, a triple-difference analysis indicates that literate parents were more likely to transmit literacy to daughters in print-rich prefectures. Overall, the findings underscore the importance of institutions in shaping the effects of technology.