MR. & MRS.---A Review of the Literature and a Rant on Epistemology

The other day, somebody said to me, “Ya know, I think brides today are taking their husband's names more than they used to. It's a trend. I'm calling it a trend.” I wondered whether it is true.

Now you might think, as I did, that you can simply type “bride maiden name” or some such into your browser and all the data you seek would pop up more-or-less instantly. We believe this because we are typically inundated with more data than we can possibly use or absorb so we just assume that whatever we want is out there somewhere. The internet is on all the time. There are a thousand channels on cable. Talk radio runs 24/7. The chatter never stops. The flow of information never even slows down. And yet....

Nick Silver's latest book is called “The Signal and the Noise,” and I don't think I'm giving much away by telling you that part of his message is that in the search for knowledge, there has always been more “noise” than “signal” and that today the level of noise is sometimes so high that any signal is almost impossible to find. So while we tend to think the answer to any question is out there somewhere, well, just try finding it.

Or as you kids say, “It's complicated.”

One problem is the meaning of the word “name.” What is a name, anyway? Is it what's on your driver's license or what your mom calls you or what it says on your electric bill, or is it what your fellow astrophysicists call you when you deliver a lecture in Vienna? Many women employ what researchers call “situational name use,” which can last for a short while or for their entire lives. And of course, the options for names are numerous. In addition to the basic maiden name or husband's name, there are women who hyphenate the two and women who use them both without hyphenating and women who choose an entirely new name and women who remarry but keep their first husband's name as a middle name and women who remarry and simply keep their first husband's name as their surname (to the chagrin of the second husband). And with situational name use, a woman may be known by two or three or four of these possibilities depending on whether she is having Thanksgiving dinner with her in-laws or performing brain surgery or dishing out ice cream at the PTA meeting. So if you are a demographer or a statistician or an anthroponomastician and you're trying to study what women call themselves, the first thing you have to do is figure out what the word “name” means.

Also, this may be one of those areas that is so tainted with identity politics and self-interest and cover-ups that the only numbers out there exist solely because somebody has an ax to grind. There are are lot of “official” statistics like that. Crime numbers, for example. You can never believe the Police Commissioner or the FBI when they tell you armed robberies are down 23%. Not only are they predisposed to reduce the number of crimes to make themselves look good, but they have no idea how many armed robberies there were, they only know what people voluntarily tell them. The guy sitting next to you on the bus is a MUCH better source of information on whether armed robberies have increased. Rapes and burglaries too. The only thing you can believe the Police Commissioner or the FBI about is murders, because murders leave dead bodies and dead bodies are difficult to hide.

But the biggest problem is that studies of women's surnames tend to be snapshots of a particular moment in time when the study was performed. One of the most comprehensive studies of women's surnames was done by the American Community Survey, which is part of the US Census Bureau. Name use for 250,000 native-born American women was compiled in 2004 and the results were published (your tax dollars at work!) in a dreary little article called “Women's Marital Naming Choices in a Nationally Representative Sample,” and if you want to know how many women took their new husband's name or used a hyphenated name in 2004, there is no better source. But I don't really care how many women took their husband's name or used hyphenated surnames in 2004 unless you can also tell me how many women did that in 1990 and 1993 and 1997 and 1999 and 2003 and 2007 and 2009. I'm looking for a trend, remember? I want to know if there are more women taking hubby's name today, or fewer.

That's the problem with the Facebook/Daily Beast study of women's surnames as well. This is very recent (2011) and it studied 14 million women between the ages of 20 and 79 who got married in the US and were active on Facebook at the time of the survey. But it only tells you about what was happening in 2011. In addition, you can't really compare the ACS women from 2004 with the Facebook women from 2011 because the women are different and the methodology was different, and the universe of women on Facebook is very different from the universe of women in the Census database, so we are left with snapshots that can't be compared to each other.

If you are looking for a trend, there is only one useful study out there, but it concerns a group of women who are so special and strange and rich and well-educated and unusual that I have never met even one of them. This is the study of women whose marriages were announced in the New York Times. Since 1980, the Times has routinely asked these brides what name they were planning to use. There are now 33 years of data.

As a database of “American women,” of course, it's a ridiculous sample. The daddies of these women are CEOs and partners in important law firms and doctors and Congressmen and Nobel Prize winners. The girls are not merely college graduates, they went to Ivy schools or the Seven Sisters, with maybe a little Sorbonne thrown in there for seasoning (do rich girls still do that?). They never worked at Wal-Mart or dished up a plate of hash browns at a diner. Almost all of them are white. None of them marry professional athletes. I mean, they ain't typical.

But they do span the years, and if you want to compare girls who went to Princeton or Wellesley in 1980 with girls who went to Princeton or Wellesley in 2005, this is where you can do it. The NYT is very strict about their standards, which have not changed since 1980. They ask every woman what name she intends to use and her choice appears in the announcement. (If she is uncertain, she is referred to only as “the bride” or by some other generic name.)

And the study of NYT brides is eye-opening. It was done by Claudia Goldin and Maria Shim (guys apparently never study this stuff), and it sampled about 300 brides per year in NYT announcements from 1980 to 2001. And guess what? Contrary to my friend's suspicion, women are keeping their maiden names more often than they used to. In 1980, only 10% of these NYT babes kept their maiden names. The number then doubled around 1984 and hung steady at about 20% until 1998. Then, suddenly, the percentage shot up to 34% by 2002. Since then, we don't know. C. Goldin and M.Shim (if those are still their names), don't tell us.

So what are we to make of all this? When my friend (OK, it was actually my sister), said she thought brides were keeping hubby's name more often than they used to, I looked into it because I suspected she was correct. Now I just don't know. The available data from the NYT suggests my sister is wrong but these NYT brides are not exactly typical of anything at all, and the data stops in 2002, so how do we know what happened in the last eleven years? We don't. Maybe my sister is right and the eggheads who study this stuff just haven't caught up with the new reality.

The real lesson for me is in the flimsiness and unreliability of the data, and this is a lesson we need to learn over and over. We want truth whether it is out there or not so we think we have found it when all we have really found is noise. A few days ago, Seattle's Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center published its findings that omega-3 fish oil consumption is linked to a 71% increase in the incidence of “high-grade” (the worst kind) of prostate cancer. Who, after all the infomercials and magazine articles and advice from doctors, saw that one coming? A day later, the CDC reported that despite what your doctor has been telling you, there is no reason for you to reduce your salt intake. This comes only a few months after Michael Bloomberg's National Salt Reduction Initiative persuaded 20 of America's biggest food companies (e.g., Kraft, Goya, Heinz, Target), to reduce the salt in their products. The uncritical acceptance of scare-stories from “researchers” or politicians looking to make a name for themselves (and a few bucks) tends to be viewed as a victimless crime, but it never is. Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring led to the banning of DDT and the deaths of millions in the Third World. Dr. Oz and Prevention Magazine and Al Gore have a ways to go before they achieve Rachel's body count, but the day is young. Nothing good ever comes from allowing the hucksters to exploit our very human desire to know, to believe, to learn the secrets. They worm their way into your heart by persuading you they care about you. They don't. Actually, they think you're stupid.

So don't believe. Believe only in God. For everything else, demand a double blind study.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki