Chinese Companies Offer Single Females Time Off to Find a Date for Lunar New Year

In an announcement made this Monday, Hangzhou Songcheng Performance and Hangzhou Songcheng Tourism Management granted their over-30, unmarried female employees an extra eight days of “dating leave” on top of the traditional seven-day break, according to the South China Morning Post.

The experiment, which follows in the footsteps of a Hangzhou middle school that began offering its single and childless teachers two half-days of “love leave” per month earlier this year, is designed to boost female employee morale and, thus, productivity.

The companies, which operate a popular tourist attraction called Song Dynasty Town in Hangzhou, announced the dating leave in order to give their female employees more chances to interact with the opposite sex — a decision warmly received by the employees, according to Huang Lei, the human resources manager at Hangzhou Songcheng Performance.

In China, single women over the age of 30 — commonly referred to as “leftover women” — are heavily stigmatized due to more conservative beliefs that unmarried women past their twenties are less desirably to men. It’s a traditional mindset that many have criticized as women trend into developing successful professional careers of their own.

China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs documented over 200 million single adults in 2015, and marriage rates have fallen every year since 2013.