Examining How Married Women Change (Or Keep) Their Last Names On Facebook

Facebook recently wondered if younger married women were more apt to keep or change their last names after marriage (at least on Facebook). The company’s data science team found that women in their 20s were the most likely to keep their maiden names, while women in their 30s and 40s hyphenated their last names more often than others.

Facebook’s Data Science page introduced this research on its page:

Are women today taking the last names of their spouses more or less frequently than before? To answer this question, we took the sample of all women who have declared their marriages on Facebook, along with the names of their spouses, and considered whether they chose to change their names, hyphenate them, or keep their names. This plot shows the proportion of women in each group across ages of married women. We see a couple of interesting effects: First, we see a strong trend that younger women are increasingly likely to keep their names, and second we find that hyphenation is most common among women in their 30s and 40s.