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in the upper tail of the income distribution. For these families, incomes arehigh, but so, too, are hours of work (Box 5-3).In sum, the growth of female hours of work and female earnings has haddifferent effects on different family types. For married mothers, stronggrowth in wages and hours worked have been a primary source of familyBox 5-3. Women Professionals, the Rat Race, andthe Time CrunchAs shown in Table 4-1, the proportion of women in many professionaloccupations has risen dramatically since 1950. As recently as 1979only 10 percent of doctors and 13 percent of attorneys were women,but by 1999 these percentages had increased to 25 percent and 29percent, respectively. The female share of enrollment in professionalschools has been rising and exceeded 40 percent in 1996. To the extentthat female professionals who are married have husbands who workfull time, this growing professionalization of the female work force hascreated a time strain for many American families. There is little evidencethat human resource systems originally designed for men withstay-at-home wives have adapted to ease this strain by offering jobswith shorter working hours. On the contrary, work hours among college-educatedemployees have been trending upward over the lastseveral decades.One of the reasons for some firms’ reluctance to abandon existingwork norms is their use of “rat race” work practices. In many professionalsettings, members of the professional group benefit from theproductivity of other group members, yet these contributions to productivityare difficult to measure and reward directly. Firms instead findthat a worker’s willingness to work long hours often serves as a proxyfor valuable yet hard-to-observe characteristics such as commitmentand ambition. In response to this use of work hours as a screeningdevice, workers will tend to overwork as a means of signaling to managementtheir ability and willingness to contribute.For example, in a survey conducted at two large Northeastern lawfirms, associates (young attorneys) and partners alike were in agreementthat “billable hours” and especially “willingness to work longhours when required” were important factors in promotion to partner.Not surprisingly, associates at these firms worked long hours. Also notsurprisingly, associates felt overworked: most indicated that theywould gladly forgo their next raise in exchange for the opportunity towork fewer hours. Nonetheless, most associates indicated that theywould be much more willing to work fewer hours if all other associatesalso agreed to cut back. Of course, firms might be reluctant to abandonthese work practices unless they can develop other effective means ofscreening junior employees.Chapter 5 | 181