Almost eight in ten American women in opposite-sex marriages said they took their husband’s last name, a new study from Pew Research Center found.
Pew said that 79% of the women made the change, while 14% kept their last name and 5% hyphenated their name.
The numbers changed slightly between older and younger women, Pew revealed. Twenty percent of straight, married women between 18 to 49 say they kept their last name, while 9% of those 50 and above did.
Women in that category with postgraduate degrees were the least likely to take their husband’s last name when they broke respondents down by education level, with 26% of them keeping their last name, Pew said. Only 11% of women with some college education or less kept their names after marriage.
Democratic and Democratic-leaning women were twice as likely to keep their names compared to Republican and Republican-leaning women, Pew also found, with a respective 20% and 10% keeping their last name.
When breaking down the survey results by race and ethnicity, Pew said that married Hispanic women were the least likely to take their husband’s last name — 30% did not. That compares to 10% of White women and 9% of Black women who kept their names. (Pew said it did not have enough married women in its sample size to analyze separately.)
Pew also surveyed unmarried women asking them what they would do if they got married. The results found 33% said they would take their spouse’s name, 23% would keep their last name, 17% would hyphenate both names, and 24% weren’t sure.
The results found that 92% of married, straight men said they kept their last name, a mere 5% took their spouse’s last name, and less than 1% hyphenated both names.
The survey said the sample size for respondents in same-sex marriages was too small to analyze.
