Roberta Katz, senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences, defines Gen Z as those born in the mid 1990s to around 2010. McKinsey & Company puts the range at 1996 to 2010, while Deloitte — which conducts an annual global survey of Gen Z and millennials — defines Gen Z as those born between 1995 and 2006.
The generational gap is real. Every generation is routinely criticised by the one before it as less disciplined, more entitled and too keen to break with tradition. George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984, summed it up best: “Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
These complaints are nothing new, but they ring especially true for Generation Z (Gen Z), the first generation to have never known life without the Internet. But who exactly falls into this group? Gen Z is generally understood to refer to people born from the mid to late 1990s to the early 2010s.
