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Gen X defined in 10 ways.
Takeaways
- There is no single measurement that determines the start and end dates for a generation. For example, the World War 1 or Lost Generation World War 2 or Greatest Generation are defined by events whereas the Baby Boomers are defined by birth rates
- The absence of a universally applied measure does not mean that generations are identified randomly. Rather it implies that a range of overlapping features can identify a core date range. It also means that cutoffs are messy, with a few years on either side of the core range.
- As the world was globalizing after the Second World War there are similar stories from across economically advanced countries and also economically advanced segments within less economically advanced countries so in the examples that follow I have switched between US and UK data and referred to Australian as well as global research, confident that the trends are comparable.
1. Female participation rates in the workforce
The first wave of feminism occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century and involved the struggle for women to have the right to vote. The second wave began in the 1960s and involved the right to work. It challenged unequal pay between women and men and sexual discrimination practices that prohibited women from accessing many careers.