Only 3% of men take their wive's family name on marriage

H/T Marginal Revolution. The original research is from Marriage name game: What kind of guy would take his wife's last name? based on work by Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer.

It's rare for men who get married to change their last names - whether they take their wife's, adopt a hyphenated version or create a combination of the two. But those that do tend to be less educated, according to a new Portland State University study.

PSU sociology professor Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer analyzed data collected from a nationally representative survey that asked men if they did anything to their surnames in their most recent marriage.

The simple facts are:

Of the 877 men, only 27, or 3 percent, changed their name. Of those, 25 dropped their last name to take their wife's and two hyphenated their last name. Among the 97 percent who kept their name, 87 percent said their wife took their last name, 4 percent said their wife hyphenated her surname while they made no change, and 6 percent said that neither changed their name. No respondents reported creating a new last name.

[snip]

It found that among men with less than a high school degree, 10.3 percent reported changing their surname. Among men with a high school degree but no college, it was 3.6 percent, and among men with any college, only 2 percent. None of the men surveyed who had an advanced degree changed their name.

Economics is a big driver here:

Even though better-educated men may have more egalitarian attitudes about gender, they also find themselves in the traditional breadwinner role and potentially have more to lose by changing their surname, the study said. Less-educated men, on the other hand, may have less to lose.

Shafer said the findings parallel studies about women who are more likely to keep their maiden names after marriage—they get married later, usually after starting careers, and are eager to preserve their professional identities.

Even three percent seems high based solely on personal experience. I don't think I know any men who have taken their wives names. And I would have guessed that adopting a common hyphenated name would have been far more common than the complete abandonment of the patronymic.