No time for love? Chinese companies offer ‘dating leaves’ to single women employees during Lunar New Year break

As China is set to welcome Lunar New Year, two Chinese companies have decided to give ‘dating leaves’ to their female employees. The two tourism-based companies, Hangzhou Songcheng Performance and Hangzhou Songcheng Tourism Management, have decided to give extra time to their single women employees to ‘go home and date’.

According to a report by South China Morning Post, the companies informed that unmarried female employees will be granted extra eight days leaves in addition to traditional seven-day break. The company is taking this step with an aim to break the stigma of ‘leftover women’. In China, single women above 30 years of age have faced stigma, being labelled as ‘leftover women’ or ‘shengnu’, as they are often seen as less desirable to men.

“Women employees mostly work in internal functional departments and some are show performers … some female staff have less contact with the outside world. Therefore, we hope to give more leave to female staff, to give them more time and opportunities to be in contact with the opposite sex,” Hangzhou Songcheng Performance HR manager Huang Lei told Zhejiang Online. Following the similar trend, a high school in Hangzhou province has allotted extra two-day leaves to single teachers every month as ‘love leave’.