Headaches Keeping their maiden names exposes women to social pressure.
Taking their husbands' can confuse business contacts. Little hard data are available, but on the anecdotal side, I conducted a very unscientific, informal survey of a dozen female business owners and professionals and reviewed their answers with business experts and sociologists. To my surprise, more than half the women I spoke to had taken their husbands' names. Of those, half kept their maiden names as a middle name. My survey didn't turn up a single hyphenator.