Engines of Empowerment: Cattle Tending, the Milking Machine, and Women in Politics

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 the share of local council seats held by women 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.