Women and titles and marital status - a brief survey for personal investigative purposes

That’s my new way of saying nosy: “personal investigative purposes.” Good, huh?

The survey ran from 16th until 18th October 2018, and there were 707 participants after I removed a TERF and someone who said “I’m a dude lol”. (Hi weiros, thanks for taking part, wouldn’t be the same without you!) You can see the responses and my tables and make a copy to play with the numbers yourself here.

Each participant was first asked to confirm that they were a woman. (Trans women and nonbinary women were explicitly invited in promotional posts and on the survey itself.) Then I asked for age, title, and marital status, in that order. On the last page before submitting there was an optional feedback box, which 12% of participants used, often to adorable effect.

I was essentially curious to know what the deal is with women having like 3 different feminine titles that each express something different about marital status. I wanted to know who was using each title, and whether Mrs or Ms was more popular, especially among married and separated women.

This was my previous understanding:

Miss: never married.



Mrs: married now or previously.



Ms: does not wish to disclose marital status with title.



And here’s how it went down.

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AGES REPRESENTED

So the age ranges were pretty much representative of the social networks the survey was promoted on, which is not surprising. That’s Twitter, Mastodon, Reddit and Tumblr, as far as I know. Participants were invited to promote the survey themselves afterwards to make the science happy by increasing all the numbers, and that might have happened on other social networks that I’m not aware of.

In the end 90% of participants were under 40, and 63% were under 30, but we still heard from 68 people over 40 and 5 people over 60, which I thought was pretty great considering I threw it all together in an hour or two and it only ran for two days, right?

The youngest participant was 13, and the oldest was 64. The mean age was 28, the mode was 22, and the median was 27.

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AGE AND MARITAL STATUS

This was fun, I hadn’t been planning to investigate but I thought, why not?

The darker the colour, the higher the percentage. It shows that the older participants were, the more likely they were to have married, and then divorced. It’s probably not surprising, since the older you are the more likely you are statistically to have done basically anything, right? I’m sure the numbers would’ve gotten higher for anything, like bungee-jumping or whatever.

Along those lines, folks were generally more likely to use the title Dr if they were older. Because as you age you’re statistically more likely to have earned a doctorate. There’s hope for me yet.*

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MARITAL STATUS AND TITLES

This is why we’re here, am I right?

I was honestly expecting the Mrs percentages to be a lot higher than Ms for married and civil partnered people. For married and civil partnered participants Ms was higher than Mrs right up until the last few hours of the survey.

I’m guessing this is because of the generally liberal and progressive attitudes of my followers and their followers and their followers and so on, and it wasn’t until right at the end when the survey was making it further out of my social bubble that it started to shift back towards my expectations.

I added Mr on the end there because two people wrote it into the “other” box, but I’d like to mention that it wasn’t a tickybox option on the actual survey. Most people used the “other” box to write “Ms or Mrs” or something like that, so Mr was the only standalone standard title that was written into the “other” textbox more than once. The titles entered only once were “Bachelor of Arts” and 1LT.

I wanted to find out more specifically how all titles looked for married and divorced/separated people, so…

Among married women, as the age of the participant increased they became less likely to use Mrs and more likely to use Ms or no title at all. I thought that was super interesting!

There were 4 married women using Miss, which made me go “huh?” until I read one bit of interesting commentary that was typed into the feedback box:

If Dr isn’t an option I prefer Miss - I don’t share my husband’s surname so Mrs is not appropriate.



I HAD NEVER THOUGHT OF IT THAT WAY. I love doing surveys, I see all kinds of new perspectives, this is the coolest.

My mum is a divorced Mrs, as far as I know, so of the 35 divorced or separated women I thought there might be one or two Mrseses, but no, it was Ms or no title for the most part. (14% were Mx, which I appreciated, being a Mx myself!) It is worth noting that the divorced/separated group was comparatively small, only 5% of respondents, probably because the sample skewed young, so it might be super unreliable and/or unrepresentative?

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FEEDBACK

Some of it was puzzling. I was accused of nonbinary erasure on Mastodon, and one person wrote into the feedback box that I am hardcore enforcing binary gender, which is weird because I explicitly invited trans and nonbinary women to take part.

Some of it was really helpful! Like, that I had forgotten to include “widow” and “common law marriage” in the marital status options, and if I do this survey again I will not be making that mistake, so thanks for that. Some of it was just generally interesting, like the person who told me that titles based on marital status have been scrapped in France.

And some of it was just lovely. Big up especially to the person who loves narwhals, the person who was confused about why they had just done the survey, the person who declared their love for me, and the person who said “i wish there was more time in general” - big mood, #relatable for many readers I’m sure.

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CONCLUSIONS

Conditional formatting with colour scales is really useful. Spreadsheets are magic. People are many and varied and wonderful, with the occasional tendency to leave sweet messages in the feedback box just because.

Divorced women don’t use Mrs.** The older you are, the more likely you are to be a Ms, even when you’re still married. Younger people are more likely to shun titles altogether. People use whatever title they feel is right, for sometimes surprising reasons.

You’re all great. Thank you for coming along with me on this journey of curiosity. Take care!

* I am 32, I did two A-Levels in my teens and then stopped, and I have no plans to go back into education. But statistically…

** Small sample, though.