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Nice: 69 Percent of Teen Girls Identify as Feminist

According to new research from UM London, the majority of British girls between the ages of 13 and 18 now describe themselves as feminist.
Photo by Studio Firma via Stocksy

If there's anything the past year has taught us, it's that grown-ups are totally useless. They're responsible for climate change, they tanked the economy, and the ones in the White House are doing a pretty good job of wrecking American democracy.

So thank god for the teens, who are running their own magazine empires, fighting for LGBTQ rights, and not actually participating in the dangerous trends everyone thinks they do, like butt chugging or sex roulette parties where people swap STIs like old copies of Sassy.

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According to a new survey of 2,000 British people aged 13 and over, 69 percent of teenage girls between the ages of 13 and 18 answered in the affirmative when asked the question: "Would you personally define as a feminist?" This compares to 46 percent of British women overall who said they identified with the label.

Researchers from media agency UM London said that teen girls were actually the age bracket most likely to define themselves as feminist out of all the women surveyed. The percentage of women who identified this way decreased correspondingly with age: 54 percent of women aged 18-24 described themselves as feminist, but only 44 percent of those aged 25-34 said they felt the same.

Read more: My 14-Year-Old Cousin Taught Me How to Be a Cool Teen

The group that was least likely to identify with feminism were those aged 55-64, as well as those aged 65 and over—only 36 percent of both groups said that they would personally define as a feminist.

"Our data suggests that feminism has disentangled from its stigmatized past where the term was considered something of a dirty word," says Sophia Durrani, the managing partner of strategy at UM London. "With seven out of 10 women aged 13-18 self-defining as a feminist (compared to less than 50 percent of all women) this is worth applauding.

"It suggests young women are now growing up in a world where they can't see why there should be any questions over equality. Young people are much more egalitarian-minded than ever before and we've moved on from empty 'girl power' talk to equality being a norm. This seismic shift could actually mean that a patriarchy that's been in place for thousands of years could be coming to an end.

"It's time we all stand up and take note."