What Brands Need to Know About Millennial Women
Key Takeaways
Millennial women are 10 percentage points less likely than millennial men to say they feel they have control over their future.
The share of employed millennial women who work remotely has dropped 7 points in two years, meaning less flexibility to balance work and home responsibilities.
Brands can connect with millennial women by recognizing and helping to ease their mental load — the invisible, unpaid labor done in the household.
Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, have been dubbed with many labels but there’s one that seems extra sticky: “the most anxious generation.” And for good reason, as this generation has experienced uncertainty and turmoil of major events from 9/11 to the Great Recession to the COVID-19 pandemic at critical junctures in their life. But there’s one cohort of millennials that seem to bear more of the burden of this label — millennial women. As they continue to carry heavy responsibilities at work and home, Morning Consult Intelligence data, which draws on millions of survey interviews about demographics, psychographics, and user habits collected daily in more than 40 countries, reveals these women feel less in control of their future than their male counterparts.
Millennial women feel they lack control
Anxiety is closely related to a sense of lacking control, and millennial women struggle in this area. When asked whether they feel in control of their future, while more than half of millennial women say they do, they are 10 percentage points less likely than men of the generation to agree. What’s more, the share who say they do feel in control has declined by 4 percentage points since early 2021.
But that’s not down to any differences between men and women in their overall responsibility or decision-making capabilities — in other words, the things that may give someone a sense of control in life. In fact, millennial women are more likely than their male counterparts to say they are responsible or jointly responsible for their household finances, and also slightly more likely to say they like making their own decisions. It’s also not because of a lack of ambition or drive — they’re nearly as likely as millennial men to say they’re hard working and motivated.
Millennial women are less likely to feel in control of their future than men
Rather, anxiety and a sense of lacking control may be coming along with the unique pressures related to millennial womens’ life stage.
Juggling work and home responsibilities is weighing on millennial women
A majority of millennial women — 58% — are parents, many specifically parenting young children. This is a notoriously demanding time in life, and also one that often highlights just how much is out of one’s control. And a large share of this group are juggling parenthood with careers, when achieving a balance in both can feel impossible in the best of times.
Notably, pressure is mounting as post-COVID return-to-office mandates have grown more common. At the beginning of 2022, 35% of employed millennial women were working remotely, and now that number has dropped to 28%. During that same time period, the share who are working full time has remained relatively consistent. Morning Consult research has shown that caregivers are more likely to prefer remote work as it allows for flexibility to account for childcare duties, but the movement in these numbers suggests millennial women are simply finding ways to do more things in the same window of time.
Millennial women juggle responsibilities at home and work
Women in this generation don’t say they want to give up the responsibility they have — 86% say they would rather do things by themselves than ask for help from others, 4 points higher than millennial men — but the preference for executing tasks may bely an underlying frustration with shouldering the mental burden.
Brands can win with millennial women by helping to ease the mental load
The concept of “mental load” is a relatively new one, relating to the idea that labor (particularly domestic although the concept could apply in other areas of society) includes the physical components — for example going grocery shopping, cooking dinner, cleaning the house — but also includes mental and emotional aspects. Mental load may include things like planning a weekly menu for a family which accounts for everyone’s preferences and dietary needs, remembering and acknowledging loved one’s birthdays, or monitoring children’s clothing and noting when items need replacing or sizing up. Common discourse suggests that in heterosexual couples, women not only shoulder the burden of the physical labor, but also the mental load.
So what does this mean for brands? It might mean offering tools to help millennial women manage the mental load or simply an acknowledgement that it exists in messaging. And while millennial women are more than capable of making choices, the burden of doing so adds more to their already full plates, so another effective way for brands to connect with this demographic is to simply provide fewer, better choices.
In the throes of a life at peak responsibility and an overwhelming amount of information and options at their fingertips, many millennial women want fewer, better choices. In fact, while the majority say they “prefer too many options as opposed to too few,” they’re 8 points less likely than millennial men to say so. From a brand perspective, that may mean narrowing product lines, simplifying options, and making purchase decisions as straightforward as possible. In reality, anything a brand can do to tick one more item off the mental checklist will be appreciated and valued by millennial women.
