Two Chinese companies are giving single female employees over 30 years-old an extra eight days of annual “dating leave”.
The companies behind a Song Dynasty-themed tourist attraction in eastern China have said unmarried women over 30 in “non-frontline” roles would be given an additional eight days of leave over the Chinese New Year to “go home and date”.
Employees at the firms were said to have welcomed the move.
Single women in China in their late 20s and early 30s are deemed to be “leftover women,” or “shengnv”, due to engrained traditional beliefs that women who are not married by then are undesirable.
More women in the world’s most populous country are choosing to focus on their careers and are marrying later or simply not marrying at all.
According to a recent survey by LinkedIn China and L’Oreal China, nearly 80 percent of women born after 1995 chose to describe themselves as “economically independent”, compared to just over 20 percent who ticked the traditional “loving wife and mother” option.
In fact, there have been previous companies to propose “blind dating leave”, but for all staff, did not distinguish between gender, so it did not be noticed.
By contrast, this time the ability to create a hot spot is precisely because they, under the banner of “Caring for female employees”, once again pushed “older single young women” to the forefront. Some people think that the label “leftover woman” is gender discrimination caused by patrilineal culture and single female leave is also a form of sexism.
