Millennials are chided for job hopping. Boomers were actually worse.

When Adele Scott finished her undergraduate degree in 2004, she wasn't certain what she wanted her career to look like. She had some experience working in customer service, so when she got an offer to work for a data management company, she couldn't think of a compelling reason to turn it down.

Over the next 17 years, much happened in Scott's personal life. She got married and had a baby. She got divorced. A few years later, she got remarried. She held several different roles and got promoted a few times. The company where she worked was sold at some point, which led to some culture changes in the workplace. But she stayed with her employer until December of 2021. So much radical change happened in her 20s and 30s, she tells me, that her job sometimes felt like the only constant.

"I stayed so long because the job offered career progression. I kept learning and growing," she says. "The people were great and the company offered flexibility, which was particularly important after I had my daughter."

Despite headlines declaring millennials the "job-hopping generation" and articles accusing them of not being able to hold down a job or commit to one employer, Scott is far from an anomaly.

For years, millennials have contended with a reputation for being fickle employees — flighty, unreliable, or simply unable to stay interested in one role for more than a couple of years at most. Lately, the label has been passed along to Gen Z as new headlines screech about a decadeslong decline in median job tenure. Take a step back, though, and the data paints a different picture. Despite millennials and Gen Z making up more than half of the workforce, data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that median job tenure today is actually longer than it was in the 1980s when the BLS first started tracking it. Data from the Current Population Survey shows that about a third of boomers and Gen Xers switched employers at age 20 compared to less than a quarter of millennials and 20% of Gen Zers at the same age. The share of workers who have stayed with the same employer for over 20 years, meanwhile, is about the same as it was in 1983. And statistics from other countries mirror this, too. While job tenure has been declining over the past decade, it's coming down from a historic peak in the early 2010s.

This idea that most boomers stayed with one employer for decades while millennials float between jobs just isn't supported by the data. There's even evidence that millennials are less likely to switch jobs as frequently as Gen X and boomers were in their youth. As it turns out, the job-hopping trope is a myth — one that raises a bigger question about the workplace.

Daniel Zhao, a lead economist and senior manager on the economic research team at Glassdoor, says that the myth of the millennial job-hopper is a "personal pet peeve" — and one that other economists share.

"More often than not, when people talk about differences between generations they are actually talking about differences between ages," he says. "Of course, younger workers behave differently than older workers. But that's because they're young. Not because of their generation."

Zhao explains that younger employees are more likely to switch jobs frequently — and always have been — because the types of jobs that people tend to do straight out of high school or college don't tend to be the types of jobs you'd hold for years on end. "Most young workers are still trying to figure out what they're going to do, and those first few jobs are important test runs — both for employees and employers," Zhao says. "It's always been that way, and this is not something that's new for millennials or Gen Z."

The variations we do see in tenure have more to do with demographic changes and larger boom-bust cycles. One example is educational attainment: Some research has found that higher degrees historically correspond with longer job tenures. As the proportion of people who hold a college degree has increased dramatically over the past century, job tenure for those groups has increased a bit as well. Another example is the changing nature of jobs. Research from 2024 found that a shift away from manufacturing jobs — traditionally a high-tenure industry — has shortened average tenures. Declining rates of unionization have also led to shorter tenures: The share of US workers who belong to a union halved from about 20% in 1983 to just 10% in 2023.

Data has also found that when the economy is robust and unemployment rates are relatively low, average job tenure across the entire labor market tends to be lower since people have more flexibility and can move to better roles. On the flip side, during downturns, there are generally fewer opportunities to switch jobs so workers tend to stay put. In the aftermath of the dot-com bubble and bust and during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, employers were doing less hiring and workers were less inclined to change jobs because of economic uncertainty, leading tenures to increase.

While a recent report by Revelio Labs found that in some industries the youngest workers seem to stay with a job for less time than past generations, an analyst wrote that the shift was "better understood as a response to multiple forces working in tandem: structural shifts in the labor market and a rethinking of what work should look like." The report said that the recent rise of side gigs, contract roles, and flexible career paths has affected how long people stay in certain types of jobs. It's not that Gen Z is extra flighty — the nature of work itself is changing.

Past experiences with a shaky job market can also shrink an employee's risk appetite over the course of their career. Both Zhao and Melody Wilding, a professor of human behavior and the author of "Managing Up: How to Get What you Need from the People in Charge," argue that millennials and Gen Z are prime examples of that.

"Millennials and Gen Z are actually less likely to switch jobs than their predecessors are at the same age," says Zhao. "For millennials, many entered the workforce when the 2008 recession hit. Many millennials were scarred by that experience and today still prioritize security over growth."

Wilding agrees. "Many saw their parents lose jobs in the Great Recession, while others graduated with massive student debt into a weak job market," she explains. "Homeownership and parenthood are also happening later, which means career stability is a top priority for many millennials well into their 30s." Research corroborates this. One international survey recently published by Mercer found that job security was the top-ranked reason people across the labor market — which is dominated by millennials — stayed in a particular job.

So what exactly stoked the myth of generational flakiness?

Zhao speculates it might be related to fear: Older workers could be worried that the way they're doing things is becoming outdated and irrelevant. Perhaps buying into — even perpetuating — the myth is a way of casting a light on the shortcomings of younger workers to discredit their value to the economy: a means of trying to disarm the competition.

Wilding has another theory. "Before social media, only your close friends and family knew when you switched roles. But now we broadcast it to everyone in our network," she says. "When something is easy to recall or notice, our brains trick us into thinking it happens more frequently, which is known as the availability heuristic. So while job-hopping rates haven't actually increased, we think they have because of seeing job change announcements in our feeds."

Wilding notes that those who generally fall into the millennial age bracket also tend to talk more openly about work-life balance and their desire to work for companies that share their values. That, she said, could be misinterpreted as a lack of commitment and might give the impression of job-hopping. "But expressing those frustrations doesn't mean they take action on them," she says. "Previous generations likely had the same concerns but kept them private, while millennials and Gen Z are simply more willing to say them out loud."

Perhaps we just like blaming millennials for things.

Some of it also comes down to pure "generational blame," our age-old tendency to disparage younger people and point the finger at them for all sorts of social, political, and economic shifts. One academic paper from 2020 notes that millennials have been blamed for everything from declining interest in baseball to killing American cheese.

Indeed, generational labels themselves are only loosely helpful in understanding what's changing over time. In the spirit of this, Pew Research announced in 2023 that it was limiting its analysis of trends through a generational lens. Kim Parker, Pew's director of social trends research, emphasized at the time that it's important for researchers to control for age and compare generations at a similar point in the life cycle.

"By choosing not to use the standard generational labels when they're not appropriate, we can avoid reinforcing harmful stereotypes or oversimplifying people's complex lived experiences," she wrote.

The job-hopping stereotype in particular risks diverting attention from some of the more damaging, underlying issues in the workplace: a toxic culture, poor pay, or policies that don't align with workers' needs.

Adele Scott, who now works in crypto, says she knows several colleagues who had similarly long stints with one employer. She isn't sure why her generation has developed a reputation for being flaky. "Perhaps we just like blaming millennials for things," she says.

If someone's hopping from job to job, she theorizes, maybe that's less to do with a generational trait and more to do with the person themself — or maybe the companies they're working for. If a lot of people start leaving a certain company, leaders should question what they can fix rather than point the finger at a vast and disparate demographic group. That may be a harder conversation to have — but a much more important one.

Josie Cox is a journalist who has worked for publications like Reuters, The Independent, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of the book, "Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality."