Keeping Your Name or Taking His: how the name you pick may seal your professional fate

Here's a hypothetical: you're a hiring manager at a small firm, looking for a smart and aggressive new employee for your sales force. Your candidates are Amy Smith and Andrea Brown-Jarrett.

Who do you hire?

Now let's say you meet two new moms at a playgroup: Sharon Taylor-Ross and Meg Carter.

Which mom do you think is more sensitive and caring?

I hope your answer is, "I don't have enough information to answer those questions." Good for you. But was your first, unguarded, response to answer Andrea for the first question, and Meg for the second?

To Hyphenate, or Not To Hyphenate: That is the Research Question

A Dutch study published last year in the Journal of Basic and Applied Social Psychology attempted to assess the value of keeping your maiden name, or taking his. Apparently, maiden name keepers might earn about $524,000 more over their lifetimes than "I'll take his" wives.

To be fair, the study involved a hypothetical situation (similar to the scenarios I asked above) and has a few other flaws as well. But essentially, when asked to consider applicants for a job, hypothetical hiring managers were more likely to hire women who kept their maiden names, and were also more likely to offer them a higher salary.

The same researchers studied existing data of 2,400 Dutch women, and found those who kept their maiden name had more education and fewer children, worked more, and had higher salaries than women who changed their names.

In another study, participants were asked to compare women they had met at a party. Women who had taken their husband's names were deemed more caring, dependent, and emotional.

(The Wall Street Journal covered this research study in this article.)

Does a Rose by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?

Picking a last name is often the first compromise of marriage. Newlyweds in this generation can find a seemingly limitless range of options: keep what you were born with, take his, take hers, she hyphenates, both hyphenate, use both in different contexts, or create a new name all together.

Men are no longer off the hook when it comes to this decision. While tolerance of her keeping her maiden name may have been the most required of men in my father's generation, the husbands of my friends don't have it that easy. They've got to be open to change too.

(In that they have a role model: I recently woke up singing the children's song "John Jacob Jingleheimer-Schmidt," and laughed as I realized JJ was ahead of his time.)

Some couples navigate this decision with ease: the choice seems easy. Cliff and I fell into this category: I didn't want to hyphenate because writing Anderson-Johnson a dozen times a day seemed tedious. If one of us had to change, it seemed easier to go with tradition than buck the system.

Understandably, other couples might not find the choice as easy. The decision forces deeper questions of what it means to create your own family; what your connections to your birth families will be; how your professional and personal lives integrate; how traditional or contemporary you feel.

If the decision is still in front of you, just remember that you don't have to rush it. Legally you (or both of you) can change your names any time you feel like filing the paperwork.

Now ... pardon me while I add a hyphen to my name on my resume.