Most people would agree that, on the whole, women have come a long way toward achieving social parity with men during the past few centuries.

Our social conventions have mostly caught up. “Miss” and “Mrs.” have been all but replaced by “Ms.”, while the archaic style “Mr. and Mrs. John Doe” sounds utterly quaint to modern ears.

Yet there remains one area of our social protocols in which the ladies definitely don’t get a fair shake: the family name.

The overwhelming majority of children born in the world, regardless of cultural or national origin, bear their father’s surname. A mother’s family name just kind of disappears, though it usually survives through her brothers.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with having your dad’s last name — I’m particularly uninterested in changing mine, being the only son of an only son.

Many couples amalgamate or hyphenate their own surnames for their children, but the result can get unwieldy.

Royal families have long had this problem with their hereditary titles.

Queen Elizabeth II is from the house (a sort of family name for royals) of Windsor. Upon ascending to the throne at age 25, the Queen decided that her future children would continue to bear the Windsor name. Her husband, Prince Philip, might’ve possibly had better luck if his house name hadn’t been Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy or clean solution to the surname inheritance dilemma. One passable, if slightly chaotic, alternative might be to pass fathers’ names to sons and mothers’ names to daughters.

Then there is the crux of the issue: the wife’s surname itself. Many women in the world do not switch names upon marrying, even in very patriarchal societies.

Today, although more American women keep their names than ever before, most — estimates range from 76 to 90 percent — still change them. This may simply be due to cultural inertia, since it makes little practical sense in today’s economy or society.

“Having the same name as your children is easier,” said Katie Roiphe in Slate, echoing the most common argument in favor of switching names.

This ad hoc “convenience” argument survives because it seems to make sense intuitively. However, having actually dealt with this issue myself, I can confidently say that the bureaucratic inconvenience of keeping one’s surname is greatly exaggerated. My parents and I have collectively wasted, at most, 90 minutes on extra paperwork over a period of more than two decades.

Even worse, name-changing acts as a brake on womens’ careers, even though the purely mental focus of the information economy has allowed women to compete on a level playing field with men for high-paying jobs.

A name is the touchstone of a person’s professional identity, and changing it is at best confusing; at worst, it can partially disassociate someone from all her prior achievements. Even women who do switch surnames often use their maiden names in corporate or academic circles.

In today’s individualistic world, name continuity is more useful than name unity. Newly married women should consider joining men in keeping the same surname from cradle to grave, and in doing so, make it just a little easier for the rest of us to give credit where credit is due.