I Am Not a Mrs. Debate Continues
I can’t believe that I am going to bring this up again but I received a lot of emails and tweets yesterday pointing me to this article in the Globe and Mail about women changing their names when they got married.
You may remember last January I wrote my most controversial post ever: I Am Not a Mrs. I was overwhelmed with comments on both sides of the debate on whether women should change their names when they get married. The debate was ignited again this week by the article which then lead to a segment on Global News for which I was interviewed.
The article discusses a study in the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology which looks at the demographics and the perceptions of women who choose to take their husband’s name.
The Globe article states:
Women who take their partner’s name are regarded as more caring but less intelligent, less competent and less ambitious, researchers from the Netherlands discovered. Moreover, they’re less likely to be hired for a job and are perceived to earn much less at work than those who keep their own name.
In a four-part study titled “What’s in a Name?”, social psychologists at Tilburg University found that Dutch women who adopted their partner’s name actually possessed different characteristics than those who kept their own, supporting previous U.S. research.
On average, those who had changed their name were older, had lower educational levels, had more children and held more conservative family values. And although they tended to display a stronger work ethic, they also worked fewer hours per week and earned a lower salary than those who did not change their names.
Click here for the story on Global News (of which I have about 23 seconds).
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