Names

Here’s a study on names (you can access the entire study from the website given here/above) that has received lots of attention—Psychology Today, The New York Times, etc. it was conducted in The Netherlands and so probably cannot be directly applied to the United States. Yet, its findings (or “hypotheses” for study in other cultures) are most interesting. The study focuses on the perceptions people have of women as a result of their changing (or not changing) their name to that of their husbands’. For example, the study found that women who took on their husbands’ names or created hyphenated names were perceived as more dependent, emotional, and caring and less intelligent, competent, and ambitious than women who kept their own names. Even more interesting is the finding that a female job applicant who took used her husband’s name was less likely to be hired than the woman who kept her own name. It will be interesting to see if there’s any effect to Portia de Rossi’s taking the name of her wife, Ellen DeGeneres, and becoming Portia Lee James DeGeneres.