Millennial women are facing the first decline in well-being since the Silent Generation, report says

In recent years, the most important markers of women’s safety and health have declined, the data showed.

The Population Reference Bureau created an index of women’s well-being, identifying the factors that best indicated the general status of poverty, education, incarceration, political representation, physical and mental health, and participation in the labor force.

The index was created to compare the status of different generations of US women at the same stage of life – around ages 25 to 34.

“While there have been some areas of generation-to-generation improvement, millennials are the first generation of women since the (so-called) Silent Generation who are seeing declines in overall well-being based on our index,” said a lead author of the report, Sara Srygley, a research analyst at Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit organization that collects population data on health and well-being. (The Silent Generation was born between 1928 and 1945, living through the Great Depression and World War II.)

Affordable, quality health care is particularly a problem in rural communities for women such as Tyler Azure, a 28-year-old mother of the Chippewa Nation raising six children — three biological children, a stepchild and her two sisters after the death of their mother — in Havre, Montana.

Often, doctors will come into town to pay off their student debt and then move on to a bigger city, she said. And mental health care is hard to find.

“You can’t really build a relationship with doctors that are continuously cycling out,” Azure said.

As a young, Indigenous women, she feels she is often overlooked and not taken seriously, she said.

Declines in health and safety did not align with where millennial women ranked when it comes to education and employment — many of those numbers went up from previous generations, according to the report.