I rather had forenames in the back of my mind when I wrote my post. But indeed, because it is hard to change your name in Germany, I know quite some women who used marriage to get rid of a surname that they did not like, because there is hardly any other socially accepted way to get rid of it.

Here in Flanders some do, most don't. Why would they? They are as much a person as their husband, with an identity and family that is not any less valid than their husband's.

My point isn’t that they should (my wife didn’t) only that it’s very common for them to do this so thinking of names as mostly immutable is incorrect even where other forms of name changes are rare.

This is in fact one of the iconic places where lack of diversity in software teams cause problems. Men may have a blind spot around name changes that women don’t, because of their lived experience.