It’s a great time to be a single female employee in China and you will be surprised to know why.
The country with the highest population in the world is seemingly unhappy with women from the younger generation becoming ‘economically independent’ and career oriented, and choosing to marry late or just even staying single.
To help its 30 plus single women employees find love, two companies in China have resorted to a unique leave policy. The companies are providing an additional 8 days of ‘dating leave’ per year to its women employees, reports The Independent.
Hangzhou Songcheng Performance and Hangzhou Songcheng Tourism Management, while speaking to Chinese media said that unmarried women over 30 in “non-frontline” roles would be given the privilege of eight days of leave per year to “go home and date”.
The leaves would come into effect over the Chinese New Year, February, 5, 2019.
The Independent quoted Huang Lei, a Human Resources Manager at one of the firms, as telling a local publication, “Female employees mostly work in internal functional departments, and some are show performers. They have less contact with the outside world; thus we hope to give more leave to them to give them more time and opportunities to be in contact with the opposite sex.”
A week ago, a school in Hangzhou in China reportedly went into a similar form of leave policy for its single ‘stressed-out’ teachers. The teachers, under the new leaves policy, will get extra two days off per month of ‘love leave’.
As per traditional Chinese culture, women are considered ‘leftover women’ or ‘Shengnu’ (in Chinese), if they are known to be single into their late 20s and early 30s.
Due to younger generation of women choosing careers over matrimony and home life in the country, China has seen a dip in the number of births. The declining birth rate in China is among the most talked about points in the country.
