We collectively urge media organizations to cease using generational labels such as "Baby Boomers", “Millennial,” “Gen Z,” and others in their reporting. While these lazy, reductionist terms have become commonplace in media and marketing over the past decade, they are extremely harmful oversimplifications that distort public understanding and perpetuate division. They are fundamentally the same as reducing people to their race or gender. Yet, over the past ten years, the media have pretended that they are widely accepted terms backed by those in the field of sociology. Terms like "Baby Boomers", "Gen Y" and "Gen X" first entered the American  in the early 1990s, with books by the duo William Strauss and Neil Howe (which were little more than marketing essays). However, these terms increasingly began to infect global discourse during the middle part of the 2010s.

Generational labels force together individuals with vastly different life experiences, priorities, and circumstances—often spanning 15–20 years in age—treating them as culturally and socially uniform. This practice misrepresents reality and reinforces age-based stereotypes. Many try to treat the labels as having fixed definitions with hard cut offs,  which amounts to saying that being born a year after a supposed cut off makes an individual the same as someone 20 years younger than them, and completely different to someone just a few months older than them. This is no different to zodiac signs and astrology. 

Moreover, these terms often reflect a U.S.-centric perspective, inaccurately applied globally, which flattens critical cultural, economic, and political differences across diverse populations. What may loosely apply in an U.S. context is frequently misleading or irrelevant elsewhere.

In 2021, sociologist Philip Cohen and 330 other sociologists issued an open letter to the Pew Research Center, a key promoter of generational labels since the 2010s. The letter stated: “These terms imply, incorrectly, that people within these groups share meaningful, cohesive traits. They don't.” The organization has since abandoned the concept of generations in their reports, yet media today still often cite them when writing about these fictitious categories. Cohen's letter emphasized that generational categories lack scientific justification and function more as cultural branding than as rigorous social science, obscuring rather than clarifying complex issues like political behavior, economic trends, or technological adoption.

We call on newsrooms to adopt more accurate, inclusive, and constructive approaches to framing demographic and attitudinal trends. Instead of relying on vague generational labels, media can refer to specific age brackets (e.g., “15- to 25-year-olds”), life stages (e.g., “young adults” or “teens”), or time periods (e.g., “people born in the 2000s”). These alternatives avoid arbitrary groupings and better reflect the diversity of experiences within age cohorts.

By moving away from generational labels, media organizations can foster greater clarity, reduce stereotyping, and promote a more nuanced understanding of societal trends.

As a society, we need to prioritize accuracy and unity over divisive and misleading terminology.