Don’t call us millennials, under-30s say
OTTAWA — Don’t call young people “millennials,” because they find the term offensive, the federal government has been told.
In focus groups conducted for Employment and Social Development Canada, researchers determined earlier this year the word elicits “strong negative connotations” and is “considered derogatory and insulting to this generation.”
Less than a month later, however, the department posted on its website an infographic, complete with a motif of a baby next to a tablet, called “Understanding & Attracting Millennials.” A list of “millennial traits” on the graphic includes that they’re “tech natives,” “socially responsible,” “want to actively participate” and “want to be heard.”
What Corporate Research Associates Inc. heard, though, in a $54,000 study conducted in March, is that young people aged 16 to 30 thoroughly resent how they’re labelled.
Calling them “youth” or “young Canadians” was just fine, they reported, but saying “millennials” is “clearly problematic across audiences and should be avoided,” researchers concluded in a final report.
“There is a stigma attached to that word,” said one young person, with another noting, “some people would take offence to this term. I’ve never heard it used as a compliment.”
Although there doesn’t seem to be a universal consensus on how the “millennial” generation is defined, it’s supposed to refer to the first generation of people growing up and coming of age in the new millennium. The American Census Bureau says millennials were born from 1982 to 2000 and Pew Research Center says they’re those born “after 1980.”
Media organizations have tried to explain what defines the generation, what it should be called and why “millennial” is the right or wrong word to use.
For their part, Canadian youth said it leads to stereotypes about “kids not working, with a crappy job, sponging off their parents,” as one participant said. The word is usually “used to describe our faults,” and to describe a generation that is “lazy” with “no ambition,” said others. A “bad generation.”
Just over 100 people, including groups of Indigenous youth, participated in the research, intended to help the government “understand the best ways to communicate with youth” and assess marketing concepts.
Other findings included that the federal government isn’t seen as “top-of-mind” for youth looking at planning their futures; that the department had better update its website; and that video “concepts” prepared for the department’s potential advertising efforts were not particularly effective.
One of those, which notably “depressed or discouraged” participants, featured a debt-filled life in a basement apartment, a “life on hold” and “the incorrect assumption in the storyline that marriage is a primary goal of most youth today.” Doom and gloom isn’t the best way to encourage student job applications and that kind of thing, they noted.