(Australia-NewsWire.Com, July 20, 2013 ) Victoria, Australia -- In a recent study conducted by Facebook and commissioned by The Sunday Times, more women in the United Kingdom were refusing a marriage name change. One third of the thirtythree million Facebook users polled did not choose a married name change when they tied the knot. The survey participants were women who were in their twenties and were already married.
Women over thirty years old who were polled were much more likely to take their husband’s name, by comparison, and only nine percent of the women over sixty had kept their maiden name. So it would seem that this is a new trend but one that is catching on. The hyphenated last name was not very popular with only four percent of women under thirty years old choosing this form of marriage name change.
When it comes to married name change in hindsight, a growing number of women wish they had kept their own name. A survey conducted by TheKnot in 2011, showed only eight percent recently married women keep their own names. However, a similar study carried out by Siteopia, just last month, showed thirty-one percent of married women wish they had stuck with their maiden name.
In an interview with University of York PhD student and researcher Rachel Thwaites, The Sunday Times also reported that women keep their names to keep their identity. Thwaites conducted a study of one hundred and two women and found that one quarter of them kept their maiden names. “They said they wanted to be equal to their partner,” she discovered. “There was a sense of 'I am me and my surname is part of that’.”