Why using ‘Ms’ is the way forward

When you write an e-mail to a woman, you often don’t know whether to call her ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs’. Using ‘Ms’ is one way to avoid the awkwardness of getting it wrong.

When you write an e-mail to a man, you know that you can call him ‘Mr’. There’s no awkwardness around that.

Why is there an awkwardness in the first place, then?

For hundreds of years, it has been standard to know a woman’s marital status simply from a three- or four-letter word, technically known as an address term. ‘Miss’ tells you she’s unmarried and ‘Mrs’ tells you she’s married. At first, you might wonder what the big deal is. Then you look at what ‘Mr’ tells you about a man’s marital status: absolutely nothing.

History tells us women have been discriminated against in the workplace because they can get pregnant and then often go on maternity leave. History also tells us that it was previously a given that a married woman will have children. Therefore employers could weed out who was likely to be in work and who wasn’t just by looking at ‘Mrs’ or ‘Miss’.

Nowadays, we look at that and shake our heads. It’s wrong to discriminate against a woman for her marital status and whether she might be perceived as likely to have a baby. Some employers, though, do discriminate.

Aside from this, you get the obvious: the address term ‘Ms’ puts women on equal footing with a man when being addressed formally. It means that it is nobody’s right to know if you’re married or not just because you’re female. And that’s the way it should be.

If men don’t have to disclose if they are married or not, neither should women. Using ‘Ms’ instead of ‘Mrs’ or ‘Miss’ is a way of showing that. So, if you ever happen to write me an e-mail or letter: it’s ‘Ms White’. And I hope you’ll join me in putting yourself on par with men too.