Mrs, Ms or Miss: why do forms require women reveal their marital status and not men?

[Ludlow2]

That's it really.

Why do women have to reveal this and not men?
Isn't it time we changed this.

One school I worked in, on the daily cover sheet the men were Brian Smith, Peter Jones etc. Women were Mrs. J White, Miss T Brown. Annoyed me every day.
On our computer system it records the women who submit a report as their full name in a column but the men get to be a Mr, e.g. Angela Angel and Mr D Emon. No one knows why.

SerafinasGoose - my Mum would have loved you

Ah! your problems have just started. According to MN, unless you're a medical doctor you shouldn't use the title of 'Dr'. To do so is to have a too high opinion of yourself and just plain stupid.

Declare Ms. It doesn't mean divorcee, it means you won't be forced into declaring private information just because you're a woman.

Same @wrinkleintime - and it happens to me too. Even by my own parents. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I disagree. I hate the fact that men can just put Mr and be done with it while women are being asked for their marital status (men are not). Yes we can use Ms but I’m of the thinking that forms should just say Mr or Ms (I’m not going to include all the multi-gender stuff as that’s not the topic).

Aha, good old MN wisdom. I hear you!

The Dr title is a lovely convenient way of circumventing those inquisitive strangers who somehow think my marital status is open season for discussion before getting down to an impersonal business transaction. I prefer to spare both my blood pressure and my time.

Also, there's nothing at all wrong with a woman having a high opinion of herself professionally. People take you at your own estimation. We have enough issues with inequalities and pay gaps between the sexes as it is.

MN can sod off. 😜

I just use Ms, always have.

I'll annoy you even more. I am Dr. And inevitably half the time it gets changed to Miss or Mrs. Apparently educated women are not permitted.

Just to add, that unless there’s a specific reason for needing to know your sex I don’t see why any honorifics need to be used.

Because, as per earlier posters, some people want to be called Ms S Smith or Mrs J Jones or Ms H Hunter, they don't want to be called {firstname}{lastname} so that's why organisations havn't all been able to scrap the salutation field on their databases! I'm pretty sure the organisations themselves don't care, and all the databases I've ever worked on have never used the {salutation} field for anything other than correspondence - every database that has needed to know the sex/gender of someone has a separate field for sex/gender which isn't linked to the salutation field.

I might start asking the bank to address me as Nordic Rain LLM. Or Master of Law Nordic Rain. I like that.

I agree, OP.

But there are still a lot of women out there who are "proud to be a Mrs", like they're in a Jane Austen novel or something.

We should be teaching teenage girls that using Miss/Mrs and changing your name on marriage is old fashioned, patriarchal bullshit and not what modern women do.

Then hopefully it'll be gone within a generation.

Given there are few banking systems that aren't lumbered with a 1960s backend. good luck with that.

I disagree. I think girls should be taught that they have the option of referring to themselves as Ms, but not that using Mrs or Miss is wrong or outdated. It's a matter of choice.

Well yes, it's just a pipe dream really. I've been trying to get the bank to list me as first applicant on my mortgage for years and somehow my husband always ends up there. Despite the fact I earn double what he does and they only deal with me.

If it were a matter of choice then men would be clamouring to have the same choices.

It si wrong and outdated though.

I live in the US and I can’t remember the last time I used someone’s title, unless it was Dr or Professor or military. In the workplace and in my communications with businesses (eg, doctors offices) it’s all first names. In grade schools the female teachers have all been going by “Ms.” since, I’d say, at least the late 90s or early ‘00s. In universities it’s Professor or first name.

It’s so not done where I live that, in my experience, it would feel juvenile and out of place to call another adult “Mrs.” (I’m sure I’d make an exception for a very elderly woman, but not someone in their 70s and younger), and I’d be astonished and fairly offended if I or any of my adult peers were called “Miss”!

I’m on a coast in an urban area, for what it’s worth. But essentially, titles are something we don’t give much, if any, head space over.

I don't think that it is wrong. And although, of course, times change, I don't think this is outdated yet. I would have been furious if anyone had told my daughter that it was WRONG for her to refer to herself as Miss, or that she is now wrong to have taken her husband's name and refer to herself as a Mrs - it was her choice.

I've just watched some episodes of an ancient 80s soap I found on YouTube, in which staff in their workplace still referred to one another as Miss and Mr So-and-So. When they invariably slid into first-name informality because 'sexual tension', they instantly reverted back to formal address whenever they were cross with each other. Forty years or so later and it all sounds very quaintly anachronistic.

These customs and practices can change. I am rarely ever addressed by Title + FamilyName these days. Even the legal profession have caught up with that one, and they're usually around 20 years behind the times of the rest of us.

Titles are already nearly obsolete. Unless 'Mx' suddenly takes off I think that before too long, they are likely to die a death.

Yet you want to impact me by taking away the title I wish to use?

I agree. 100%.

I think it's more about how people like to be addressed. Being 'Mrs' still has status to a certain kind of person, such as my mother who insisted on addressing letters to me as 'Miss' until I told her I was going to bin them if she didn't stop.

Just call yourself Ms. I get really irritated when forms only have Ms and remove the choice from me- I use Miss and don’t like the choice being made for me