Generation Entitled

In offices around the country, a generational war is a-brewing by Courtney E. Martin


An impressive young woman in a trendy suit is acing her interview at a network news channel. She pontificates on the thesis she wrote at her $40,000 a year liberal arts college (documentary film and its capacity to influence elections), she reflects on the ups and downs of the various broadcast journalism internships she's endured, and she expresses earnest enthusiasm for the job in question. But right as she shakes her potential employer's hand, her exit becomes horrifically ungraceful. She asks, "How quickly can I be promoted to executive producer?"

The interviewer gulps. The words overly entitled flash in her brain like a Las Vegas neon sign. "Don't call us. We'll call you," she says, her mouth tightening.

This scenario, culled from journalist Hannah Seligson's vast archive of intergenerational tension, is representative of a larger trend. 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."

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.

Seligson, the 25-year-old author of The New Girl on the Job, agrees. "Having your parents clap when you get out of bed in the morning doesn't exactly set you up to expect a life of hard work," she says.

Paula*, a young woman who works at a major New York PR firm, remembers her first taste of real life after college. "It was like the wind got knocked out of me. Here I was, Ivy League educated, Phi Beta Kappa, and no one really cared. Especially my female bosses."

Twenge has seen this happen to young women over and over again. "The gap between expectations and reality has widened to a yawning gulf of disappointment," she writes in Generation Me.

Too often, employers attest, young people demand outlandish pay raises, over the top vacation time, or unreasonable extras like subsidized travel or food stipends. They've even been known to request these things before the job is theirs. Carly Guthrie, a former human resources director for one of the country's most famous chefs, remembers one young woman who came up to her at a college fair and asked her a few uninspired questions about an available position. Then this woman said, "I blog about restaurants. Could you comp me a press reservation at The French Laundry?"

"Classic," says Guthrie, 32, laughing at the young woman's boldness. People wait years to get into The French Laundry, and usually pay an arm and a leg once they get in.
 

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