Ladies get your resume ready, companies in China offer ‘dating leave’ for single female employees

No more asking awkward ‘leaves’ because of the date you had scheduled last week. Two companies in China are giving single female employees over the age of 30 an extra eight days of annual ‘dating leave’. This comes as big news for working women over 30 who have been labelled the controversial ‘leftover women’, because the companies are now urging single women to go out there, date and find love.  

As of now, two companies, Hangzhou Songcheng Performance, and Hangzhou Songcheng Tourism Management have said that unmarried/single women over 30 in non-frontline roles would be given an additional eight days of leave over the Chinese New Year for dating reasons.

This news has been well-received by the employees at the firms and are reported to have welcomed the move.

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“Female employees mostly work in internal functional departments, and some are show performers,” Huang Lei, a human resources manager at one of the firms, told a local publication.

“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.”

Single women in China in their late 20s and early 30s are deemed as ‘leftover women’ or shengnu, which are seen as the more undesirable women due to engrained traditional beliefs, which the Chinese people have tailed for a long time. The Telegraph reported that China’s marriage rate has also fallen every year since 2013, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, leaving roughly 200 million single adults in the world’s second-largest economy.