I think I heard somewhere that the personal is political. We receive our share of unusual inquiries hereabouts. The other day, we got one ("bcc: many folks") prompted by this page and reading in part:

your first three choices for "Title" on your drop-down "Select Title" menu are: --Mr.; --Mrs.; and --Ms. This implies that you are using "Ms." as an abbreviation for "Miss," which is incorrect. Furthermore, it is very discouraging to those of us who fought for years to eliminate the varieties of ways in which women are discriminated against, by our laws and by our cultural institutions. A major tactic in this effort was the creation of a title for women (Ms.), parallel to that used for men (Mr.), for the purpose of denoting gender only and nothing at all about marital status, as a means of eliminating the institution of requiring that women identify themselves as either never-married or as [previously] married. ... I BEG you, remove "Mrs." from your drop-down menu and stop requesting women to tell you whether or not they are-now-or-ever-have-been married. It is SO 19th-century, and it invites a renewal of discrimination against women based on marital status.

This was an interesting inquiry for us: we'd already removed 'Mrs.' once before. And for exactly the reasons enumerated by our correspondent. It didn't go over well at all. Or it might be more precise to say that probably the vast majority of people signing up didn't notice or didn't care, but to a fairly vociferous minority, permitting only "Ms." was an unacceptable bit of effrontery on the part of a database. Data seems a neutral enough thing, but there are those occasional fault lines -- ultimately inherent in the whole purpose of a database to regiment and categorize information -- between user sensibilities, conflicting cultural norms, and convenient data management. We offer the Title field as a picklist primarily to service the latter. The database itself will accept other values for these fields (and the forms can be rewritten to give other choices using our API), but forcing a user to choose, say, "Mr." prevents people hand-entering "Mister", "mr", or a mistyped "Mnr", which in turn makes retrieval easier. That's simple enough. But once we choose standardization points, well, we're picking winners and losers. Since most people's titles are self-identified through web forms, that's a sensitive business. Pretty much everyone at DIA, male or female, is of the "Ms."-using sort and altogether sympathetic to our interlocutor, but that's not -- at least not yet -- completely true of all our organizations' supporters, even though those supporters skew liberal. Over 8% of all the filled "Title" fields in our database are filled with "Mrs.", and those primarily by women who themselves chose "Mrs." when "Ms." was also on the menu. Though there's no objectively right or wrong point at which to balance the tradeoffs involved, we view that as too many people not to meet where they're at. (In managing donor data in my last life, I took a similar tack: female titles defaulted to "Ms.", but if something else was explicitly indicated by the donor, it's counterproductive not to respect it. To explore further this diversion, it's worth remarking that in fundraising, the nearly-obsolete title of "Miss" -- which we've never had as an option, and to my knowledge never had requested -- is a hot indicator of a candidate for planned giving, i.e., for leaving a bequest to a nonprofit in her will. Reason: it's almost exclusively used by older women who don't have children of their own.) The cultural evolution of "Ms." is obviously quite a lot larger than our particular corner of software. It certainly seems the case that, whatever the original intent of the word, "Ms." has indeed supplanted the place held by "Miss" while also winning over many married women. "Mrs." just hasn't fallen away, however, and it does anecdotally seem preferred by enough women, including younger ones, that it's not going away soon. One suspects, nevertheless, that in the longer arc, time is indeed on our correspondent's side: Women choosing "Ms." from the menu outnumber "Mrs." nearly 3 to 1.