Who Is Gen Z?
Part I
The generation that grew up online and is now entering institutions built before it
Generation Z is often described through stereotypes.
TikTok. Short attention spans. Climate activism. Job hopping. Memes. Political anger.
But none of those things, on their own, explain a generation.
Gen Z is now old enough that the question has changed.
It is no longer:
Who will Gen Z become?
It is increasingly:
Who are they becoming as workers, voters, parents, activists, consumers and political actors?
And perhaps more importantly:
What happened around them while they were growing up?
This is Part 1 of a four part series on Gen Z. The series looks at who Gen Z is, how the generation organizes, how mobilisation becomes political power, and what may come next with Gen Alpha.
First, who counts as Gen Z?
There is no scientific law defining where one generation ends and another begins.
Pew Research Center treats generational boundaries as analytical tools rather than exact natural divisions. It uses 1996 as the final Millennial birth year, with the next generation beginning in 1997.
For this article, we use a common working definition:
Gen Z: born approximately 1997 to 2012.
That makes them roughly 14 to 29 years old in 2026.
This matters.
Gen Z is no longer simply a teenage generation.
Its oldest members are approaching 30.
They are already in workplaces, universities, militaries, political parties and public institutions.
Some are raising children.
Some are running companies.
Some are standing for election.
The generation is beginning to move from being observed to becoming part of the machinery itself.
They did not discover the internet
Previous generations experienced major technological transitions.
Baby Boomers watched television become dominant.
Generation X grew up alongside personal computers.
Millennials experienced the expansion of the internet.
For Gen Z, digital connectivity was increasingly the environment itself.
Pew identifies technological change as one of the important distinctions between Millennials and the generation that followed them. Millennials came of age during the internet explosion. For people born after 1996, social media, mobile connectivity, constant internet access and on demand communication were increasingly part of life from the beginning.
That distinction may be more important than the individual platforms they use.
Facebook can disappear.
TikTok can be replaced.
X can change.
Discord can evolve.
But the underlying expectation remains:
Communication is immediate. Information is searchable. Networks are persistent. Almost anyone can publish.
For much of Gen Z, this is not technological innovation.
It is normality.
They also watched adults learn social media in public
Gen Z did not only grow up using social media.
Many also grew up watching parents and other adults experiment with it in real time.
Family life.
Meals.
Holidays.
Opinions.
Arguments.
Personal updates.
Sometimes far more than younger observers themselves might later choose to share.
That may have produced another kind of digital literacy.
Younger users could observe not only what social media made possible, but also what could feel excessive, performative, embarrassing or simply too private.
This should not be treated as a universal Gen Z trait.
It is an observation rather than an established generational rule.
But it raises an interesting possibility.
Part of the generation may have learned the norms of social media by watching an older generation discover its mistakes first.
For some, digital fluency may therefore include not only knowing how to post, but knowing when not to.
Their formative years were not particularly calm
Generations are partly shaped by events occurring during childhood, adolescence and early adulthood.
Gen Z has moved through an unusual sequence.
The aftermath of the global financial crisis.
The rapid expansion of smartphones and social media.
An intensifying climate debate.
A global pandemic.
High inflation and pressure from rising living costs.
War returning to Europe.
Growing geopolitical tension.
And now generative AI entering education and work.
Not every member experienced these events in the same way.
A teenager in Norway, a student in Kenya and a young worker in Bangladesh do not inhabit the same economic or political reality.
That is one of the most important cautions when discussing generations:
Gen Z is global. Its circumstances are not.
Money may matter more than the stereotype suggests
Gen Z is frequently portrayed as a generation driven primarily by values, identity or purpose.
Those things matter.
But financial security matters enormously too.
Deloitte’s 2025 global survey included 23,482 Gen Z and Millennial respondents across 44 countries.
Among Gen Z respondents, 48 percent said they did not feel financially secure, compared with 30 percent the previous year.
More than 80 percent of Gen Z and Millennial respondents said their daily finances and long term financial future contributed to anxiety or stress.
The same research describes money, meaning and wellbeing as closely connected priorities rather than separate concerns.
That complicates another stereotype.
Gen Z may want meaningful work.
But that does not mean money has become unimportant.
Quite the opposite.
Financial insecurity may be one of the conditions shaping how the generation thinks about work in the first place.
They may also think differently about a career
Traditional career logic is relatively simple.
Enter an organisation.
Move upward.
Become a manager.
Gain status.
Remain.
Deloitte’s 2025 survey suggests that this hierarchy may be less compelling to many younger workers.
Only 6 percent of Gen Z and Millennial respondents said reaching a leadership position was their primary career goal. Learning, financial security, meaning and wellbeing were prominent in how respondents described career priorities.
That does not prove Gen Z has rejected hierarchy.
Nor does it mean young people will hold the same preferences when they are 40.
This distinction matters throughout generational analysis:
Is something a Gen Z effect, or simply a youth effect?
We do not yet know the answer in every case.
Gen Z is political, but not necessarily in the old way
Here the picture becomes especially interesting.
Young people can appear extremely politically visible.
Protests spread quickly.
Political videos circulate globally.
Campaigns emerge around individual issues.
Online communities can organise thousands of people without traditional membership structures.
But visibility should not be confused with institutional representation.
The Inter Parliamentary Union reported in 2026 that only 2.8 percent of parliamentarians worldwide were aged 30 or younger.
It also found that 37.1 percent of parliamentary chambers had no members aged 30 or younger at all.
For the first time since the IPU began tracking the measure in 2014, progress in youth representation had stalled.
That creates a striking gap.
Young people can be highly visible in political culture while remaining weakly represented inside formal political institutions.
Visibility and institutional power are not the same thing.
But Gen Z is not one political bloc
This is essential.
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Gen Z is not automatically left wing.
It is not automatically right wing.
It is not automatically progressive, nationalist, anti capitalist or anti establishment.
Evidence from young voters in the United States illustrates the problem with treating youth as a single bloc.
CIRCLE’s analysis of the 2024 electorate found changes in both party identification and ideological composition among young voters compared with 2020. It also cautioned that these changes describe those who actually turned out to vote, not necessarily all young people.
Other CIRCLE research found that young voters prioritised a wide range of issues and that economic concerns were particularly important.
In later analysis, CIRCLE found that 46 percent of young voters said one of their main reasons for voting was to have an impact on issues they cared about.
Party loyalty was much less important as a stated motivation. In a post election survey, only 9 percent named support for candidates from their political party as one of their top reasons for voting.
That may be more informative than trying to assign the generation one ideology.
A cautious description might be:
Issue driven before uniformly ideological.
But even that should not automatically be applied across countries.
The interesting question may not be what Gen Z believes
It may be how Gen Z organises.
Traditional political organisation often moved through institutions.
Party branches.
Trade unions.
Student organisations.
Newspapers.
Churches.
Professional associations.
Local committees.
Digital political organisation can work differently.
A network can form before an organisation exists.
A slogan can spread before anyone has appointed a leader.
A video can reach millions before a political party has decided how to respond.
People can coordinate around one issue without agreeing on a complete ideology.
That creates an important distinction.
A generation can become highly effective at mobilisation without necessarily converting that mobilisation into lasting political control.
Those are different kinds of power.
Mobilisation is not the same as power
Think of three stages:
Mobilisation power → electoral power → institutional power
Mobilisation power is the ability to place an issue on the agenda, organise people or force a political response.
Electoral power is the ability to convert that mobilisation into votes.
Institutional power is the ability to convert votes or political pressure into durable influence over legislation, budgets, governments or institutions.
Success at one stage does not guarantee success at the next.
A movement can fill streets and dominate social media without winning elections.
It can win votes without entering government.
It can enter government without creating lasting institutional change.
Whether Gen Z can consistently convert mobilisation power into electoral and institutional power is one of the questions this series will examine next.
Institutions may also be struggling to reach them
The gap is not necessarily caused only by young people rejecting traditional institutions.
Institutions may also be struggling to reach young people.
Before the 2024 US election, CIRCLE found that 19 percent of young people said they had heard about politics and issues from political parties or campaigns.
By comparison, 67 percent reported encountering political or election information through people they knew, while 59 percent cited local media and 55 percent national media.
That suggests a two sided problem.
Young people may be organising outside traditional institutions.
But traditional institutions may also be comparatively weak at entering the networks where young people already are.
So what actually makes Gen Z different?
Some characteristics attributed to Gen Z are simply characteristics of being young.
Young people have challenged authority before.
They have protested before.
They have adopted new technologies before older generations.
They have distrusted institutions before.
Every generation risks mistaking ordinary youth behaviour for something historically unique.
So caution is necessary.
But several conditions surrounding Gen Z appear distinctive in combination.
They entered adulthood in a world of permanent digital connectivity.
They can build political networks with very little formal infrastructure.
Many face substantial economic insecurity.
Their political visibility can be much greater than their representation inside formal institutions.
And generative AI is arriving just as large parts of the generation enter higher education and the workforce.
None of those factors alone proves that Gen Z is historically unprecedented.
Together, however, they create a social environment that earlier youth generations did not encounter in exactly the same form.
Perhaps the wrong question is, what does Gen Z believe?
Because the answer is:
Many different things.
There are hundreds of millions of people in this generational cohort across radically different cultures, economies and political systems.
The more useful questions may be:
How does Gen Z communicate?
How does it organise?
What institutions does it trust?
What does financial insecurity do to its behaviour?
How does online mobilisation translate into offline power?
What happens when this generation moves from protesting institutions to running them?
Those questions are only beginning to become answerable.
One generation, many realities
The label Gen Z is useful.
But only to a point.
A generation is not a personality type.
It does not vote as one bloc.
It does not share one economic experience.
And it does not have one political destination.
Pew’s broader warning about generational research is useful here.
Generations can help us understand social change, but they should not become labels that oversimplify differences between people.
That may be the best starting point for understanding Gen Z.
Not:
What stereotype describes them?
But:
What happened to the world while they were becoming adults, and how are they responding to it?
Who Is Gen Z?
A generation born into digital connectivity.
A generation entering adulthood under economic pressure.
A generation highly visible in political culture but still weakly represented in many formal institutions.
A generation that cannot be placed cleanly on one ideological axis.
And a generation whose relationship with political and economic institutions is still being formed.
The most important part may come next.
Because Gen Z is no longer waiting to enter society.
It is already inside it.
Next in this series
Part 2: How Gen Z Organizes Differently
Part 3: Can Gen Z Turn Protest Into Power?
Part 4: Who Is Gen Alpha?
Gen Alpha will not simply grow up online.
They are growing up with AI already present.
Sources
Pew Research Center
Defining generations: Where Millennials end and Generation Z begins
Deloitte
2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey
Deloitte Global
Deloitte Global’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey
Inter Parliamentary Union
Youth representation in parliament flatlines for first time in 12 years
Inter Parliamentary Union
IPU Parline global parliamentary data
CIRCLE, Tufts University
The Youth Vote in 2024
CIRCLE, Tufts University
Young People and the 2024 Election: Struggling, Disconnected, and Dissatisfied
CIRCLE, Tufts University
Youth and the 2024 Election: Likely to Vote and Ready to Drive Action on Key Political Issues
CIRCLE, Tufts University
25 Things We Learned about Young Voters in 2025
