Even those who aren't stalled at work can feel pressured by the lingering effects of the worst economic slump in seven decades on a generation that has had rotten timing.
"You look at our generation and we're on the cusp of financial disaster, and it's the first time that the American dream isn't what we all thought it was," says Bryce Pickering, who has worked at Citigroup Inc. in New York for 10 years and, at 32, is among its youngest managing directors.
"A lot of my friends have been caught up in a bad cycle of graduating at the wrong time, starting in a field that blew up, deciding to go back to school and getting into debt to do that, buying a house that's now worth half what they bought it for."
On the job, the report says, Pickering's cohort is running up against the "behemoth" baby boomer generation of 78 million Americans. Forty-seven percent of this group view themselves as in mid-career and 68 percent believe there's still time for promotions, according to the center. And coming up behind Generation X is "Generation Y," at 70 million strong.
Generation X -- whose members include Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both 38, and Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, 42 -- is much smaller than its predecessor. "When boomers were in middle management, they didn't have pressure from Generation X leapfrogging them because it's not a huge group," says Hewlett, who is the director of the Gender and Policy Program at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. "We think that Generation X is certainly feeling this more strongly because the boomers are delaying retirement."
Todd England, an air traffic controller, says he's "stuck in the middle," unable to become a supervisor because older managers need him to train younger controllers.
"We're like the layer in between the cookies," says England, 46, who works in Los Angeles. "Unless we actually step up to the plate and take management and leadership roles, we will be the forgotten generation."
Birgit Neu, chief operating officer for corporate development for global banking and markets at HSBC Holdings Plc in London, says she has also felt the pressure. Neu, 41, started studying for a business degree at New York University in 1987, the month before stock markets crashed and the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost a record 23 percent in one day.
The Philadelphia native graduated into the recession of the early 1990s and worked in publishing, then moved into the dot- com industry, holding three jobs during the Internet bubble and weathering the contraction that followed at a brokerage.
A single mother who often negotiates work from her Blackberry while pushing her four-year-old son on the playground swing, she says she is very aware of HSBC's younger generation.