Via Anna:
Younger women arrive at a new office pumped up on Suze Orman and you-go-girl self-empowerment, and are quickly deflated by the necessary drudgery of copying and collating. Older women, who have paid their dues dealing with sexism and grunt work for decades, are chagrined that younger women assume they can just show up and take over. Commence an intergenerational clash.
Paula Bruno, the 43-year-old founder of a financial blog for women called Chicks and Balances, has noticed this dynamic developing more frequently. “There’s this influx of young women who don’t understand all the baby steps necessary in order to make it to the top,” she says. “I’m glad they have confidence, but boy do I wish they also had the savvy to realize that they can be pretty offensive to the veterans when they clearly don’t expect to play by the rules.”
I don’t agree with everything Courtney Martin says in this article. Our generation is, actually, quite entitled - at least in the way this article claims we are. The millennials (born in the 1980s to 2000s) are go-getters: they have the skills, knowledge, and ambition to get it done, so of course they grunt and groan when they are placed in positions much below their caliber because of their limited experience or age. It’d be like trying to run for President when you’ve only been a Senator for one term… Opps.
Yes, this is an intergenerational conflict, but it not what Martin claims it is. She puts all of the burden on the younger generation’s ambition, and not on the lack of communication between generations. The problem is the older generation doesn’t understand the younger generation can do so much more, and that they want to do so much more because they have the skills, expectations, etc. The younger generation doesn’t understand that the older generation expects them to put in their dues before they can get the good assignments, positions, etc: they feel entitled because they have a fancy degree and were told by their parents that they could do anything they wanted.
So, yes, there is a sense of entitlement on the younger generation’s part, but there is also a skewed perspective on what your job requires of you, and what is expected of you as someone entering the workforce for the first time.
Justifying the anger of the older generation by saying they had to fight through grunt work, etc, to get where they are today is totally unfeminist. Working women have been fighting to make the workplace safer and more beneficial to women for decades, and not just because they wanted it better for them, but because they wanted it better for themselves, and future workers. The problem is, of course, they’re threatened by a 22 y/o fresh out of college who knows who to work 3 operating systems, manually code web pages, dabble in graphic design, put together a decent article for the company newsletter, handle registration for events, control travel arrangements, AND copy, fax, print, and scan. Oh, and she can do it all in half the time.
While you can justify some of the jealous or anger on the younger generation’s aptitude with technology, that’s not always true. You can’t make the generalization that every older woman is not good at computers while their younger counterparts are. I have met 50 y/o computer genii and 21 y/os who can’t even find the on button. It’s not an age gap that causes the differences in technology, it’s the individual and whether they are willing to adapt to new technologies, and whether or not they like to use computers.
That financial blogger she quotes is a moron. Last time I checked, doing work above your pay grade, but within your skill level (and with permission), was not “against the rules”, it just makes people uncomfortable because you’re willing to do more work for less pay, making them and their big salary disposable. Unless you’re coming to work naked and doing that, I don’t see a rule violation here. And, the last time I inquired, doing an extra project to prove you have skills was not verboten: it was good business sense.
The only part of the article that is based on research actually holds a lot of truth, and explains why millenials (not just female ones) have difficult entering the workforce after college:
Jean Twenge, a psychologist and professor at San Diego State University, explains the mentality of 20-somethings in the workforce in her book Generation Me as wildly ambitious, not great at taking criticism, hungry for praise, and constantly craving flexibility. In other words, all that self-esteem education has had the nasty side effect of making younger women seem too big for their Blahniks.
Besides Martin’s snarky remark and incorrectly based assumptions, that paragraph is spot on.
When trained correctly, a millenial worker can be the best person on your team. When you pair that ambition with a nasty attitude, they can be the bane of your existence.
